Subject: [Tsvwg] bringing experimental congestion control to the IETF

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:06:10 +0200

Hi,

the attentive reader of IETF agendas will have picked up on the  
following presentation during the TSVAREA meeting:

20 min	Bringing Experimental High-Speed Congestion Control to the IETF
	Lars Eggert

I'd like to outline what that presentation will be about, for the  
benefit of those who can't travel to Prague. It will propose an  
approach for specifying high-speed congestion control in IETF  
Experimental RFCs for the community to discuss and hopefully form a  
consensus on.

For a number of years, there has been considerable interest in the  
research community on TCP extensions for high-speed networks that has  
resulted in a number of promising congestion control variants.  
Bandwidths that had been considered "high-speed" years ago are now  
readily available to consumers in many countries, resulting in a  
corresponding interest by the operating system community to deliver  
mechanisms to the users that can efficiently utilize these kinds of  
uplinks. Several widely-deployed operating systems already implement  
non-RFC-compliant congestion control mechanisms. This is happening  
without much community review and often without a publicly available  
technical specification, which is troubling.

The proposal is that the IETF and IRTF offer to be a venue for  
community discussion and review, followed by an eventual technical  
specification of such congestion control variants. The  two initial  
goals are (1) at a minimum, to document the mechanisms in currently  
deployed stacks in Informational RFCs and (2) to publish a number of  
more thoroughly analyzed congestion control variants as Experimental  
RFCs.

For the first class of documents, there will be a clear statement  
calling out that the contents of these Informational drafts document  
the implementation choices of particular stacks and are not  
recommendations, endorsements, etc. by the IETF. We've been  
publishing such documents in the past.

The second class of (Experimental) documents will be published with  
statements that indicate that the IETF believes them to be safe for  
experimentation on the Internet, or safe for experimentation in  
certain more restricted network environments. This is similar, for  
example, to the statements the IETF made for QuickStart or HighSpeed  
TCP. We are currently aware of at least three congestion control  
variants that have been proposed for such Experimental specification.

To be able to make such statements about Experimental congestion  
control variants, a review phase needs to occur in the community. The  
proposal is to use the expertise in the IRTF's congestion control  
research group during the initial phase of that review process. The  
proposers of high-speed congestion control variants will present  
their mechanism and results to the ICCRG, which will analyze and  
discuss these variants with the goal of determining whether they can  
be declared safe for experimentation, and under which conditions.  
draft-ietf-tsvwg-cc-alt and draft-irtf-tmrg-metrics contain some  
guidelines and metrics that will be useful during this review.

The ICCRG review phase will be followed by technical specification in  
the Transport Area in Experimental RFCs. The proposal is to add a  
work item to the charter of the TCPM working group for the  
Experimental standardization of such ICCRG-reviewed congestion  
control variants.

Lars

PS: Please discuss on [email-masked]. Reply-to set accordingly.

---

From: "GOGWIM, JOEL GODWIN" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:19:28 +0100 (WAT)

Thank you for this info. Its really help us that will not attend.

> PS: Please discuss on [email-masked]. Reply-to set accordingly.

       ~          Gogwim, Joel Godwin
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