Subject: [LOOPS] LOOPS BOF

From: Marie-Jose Montpetit <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 16:12:25 -0700

My take on Monday’s non-WG forming BOF - in a nutshell what is the problem?
(not even the scope yet)

If it is performance optimization over interconnected links with different
delay/loss characteristics and with or without host collaboration and/or
access I am sorry to tell you that there has been a lot of work done in
industry and academia addressing this.

Whatever you do you will hit t the fact that a lot of the network coding or
FEC you need is protected. Will LOOPS develop at new code? If yes then
LOOPS is NWCWG the IETF version of our RG. You will also hit the tunneling
limitations and of course proprietary PEPs (the open source ones are okish
though) and the usual issues of congestion losses vs. random losses and we
have looked at this for ages now it seems and we have gotten good at it.

I disagree with the assessment that “long losses” are due to congestion on
your path, they may be due to issues on another path and in wireless some
kind of deep fade that the lower layers did not catch - beware that “delay”
is also a sign of loss.

I agree with some of the discussions today
<http://airmail.calendar/2019-07-23%2012:00:00%20GMT-4>: what layer are we
talking about here? L3?  But some of the diagrams showed OLT and below  L3.
 “Solving" problems at L3 without looking at what is either below or above
is I think something the proposing team should look at. It has helped me in
the past.

A combination of the work we did in NWCRG and what has also been addressed
in ICNRG and ICCRG (and others) is what LOOPS needs. DO we need a new WG to
get that work out of IRTF?

But if the goal of this group is to make progress there are other issues to
address. Mine would be how to implement L3 solutions in an L4 encrypted
world. And others.

Just to say you are there to improve Internet performance of course is
good: we are all here to do that.

mjm

Marie-José Montpetit, Ph.D.
Research Affiliate, MIT Media Laboratory
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:54:12 -0400

Hi, Marie-Jose,

Thank you for bring these considerations to this mailing list.

(Aside - what follows is my opinion with no hats, because I don't have any,
but I hope it is also helpful to the LOOPS community).

On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 7:12 PM Marie-Jose Montpetit <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> My take on Monday’s non-WG forming BOF - in a nutshell what is the
> problem? (not even the scope yet)
>

One way that the IESG has chartered new work in the past, has been when
research communities feel that at least some of their research output is
stable enough to standardize for engineering. As NWCRG co-chair, you would
know (but others may not) that some of your work came to TSVWG in order to
add Sliding Window Random Linear Code (RLC) Forward Erasure Correction
(FEC) Schemes for FECFRAME - and that worked, because three of those
documents are in the RFC Editor queue now. IRTF work coming to the IETF
allows wider review, and publication on the Internet standards track.

I hope LOOPS will consider NWCRG's experience in this area.

> Whatever you do you will hit t the fact that a lot of the network coding
> or FEC you need is protected.
>

Do you mean IPR-encumbered? If so, that doe mean IETF working groups
providing technology to perform local optimizations will need to consider
IPR and licensing disclosures.

> Will LOOPS develop at new code? If yes then LOOPS is NWCWG the IETF
> version of our RG.
>

The question of reference implementations should be considered by the LOOPS
community before requesting WG actions by the IESG.

> You will also hit the tunneling limitations and of course proprietary PEPs
> (the open source ones are okish though) and the usual issues of congestion
> losses vs. random losses and we have looked at this for ages now it seems
> and we have gotten good at it.
>

That will be very helpful in scoping LOOPS.

> kind of deep fade that the lower layers did not catch - beware that “delay”

This is exactly the kind of question that an IETF working group should be
looking at.

> <http://airmail.calendar/2019-07-23%2012:00:00%20GMT-4>: what layer are
> we talking about here? L3?  But some of the diagrams showed OLT and below
>  L3.  “Solving" problems at L3 without looking at what is either below or
> above is I think something the proposing team should look at. It has helped
> me in the past.
>

Agree. I had the privilege of watching most of the LOOPS proponents
discussing their thoughts intensely for almost the entire length of the
Hackathon last weekend, and I think you're pointing to the misalignments
that are inevitable when many implementers are working in isolation. That
alignment needs to happen during chartering discussions, so that we are all
solving the same problem. About 10-12 BOF participants raised their hands
to indicate that they were working on products in this space, and the
proponents are hoping to make it easier for these people to be more
aligned.

> get that work out of IRTF?

If it is to be published on the Internet standards track, yes. The IRTF
stream produces Informational and Experimental RFCs, but not BCPs or
Standards-track RFCs.

> But if the goal of this group is to make progress there are other issues
> to address. Mine would be how to implement L3 solutions in an L4 encrypted
> world. And others.
>

Yes. Discussions on this mailing list will be necessary to scope any
charter requests to the IESG, if we don't want to be holding another BOF in
Singapore that starts from where we are now :-)

> good: we are all here to do that.

Again, thank you for your help and insights.

Spencer

> --
> LOOPS mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/loops
>

---

From: Marie-Jose Montpetit <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 17:02:51 -0700

See inline.

On July 23, 2019 at 7:54:37 PM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF (
[email-masked]) wrote:

Hi, Marie-Jose,

I agree and LOOPS could be some exit strategy for the work. But talking to
us before could have been nice. I had talked to some of the proponents
individually but not in a BOF sense.

There are many. Depends on the use case.

OK. We can discuss that.

IETF? I think a lot of that is research.

That is the point. The architectures presented at the BOF were mixing
layers. Again like Aaron Falk said: what is the problem?

Ok. But ignoring what we did in the RGs is no way forward. And kills the
purpose of the IRTF.

Ok

Spencer

Thanks