Re: [Bloat] bbr on slashdot

[Hal Murray <hmurray@megapathdsl.net>]

Sebastian Moeller said:
> Interestingly, the naive expectation in the vice text is equal sharing
> between all concurrent flows, if only we had a system that could actually
> help achieving this kind of set-up that is fair to each flow... 

Is there consensus on what a flow is?  Or what the unit of traffic that 
fairness measures should be?

It seems to me that it depends on where you are located.

Consider upstream traffic:

If I'm a workstation or server, I probably want to give equal weight to each 
connection.

If I'm an exit router at a residence, I probably want to give equal weight to 
each IP Address.  If not, pigs can game the system by making multiple 
connections.  But if I have a server, maybe I want to reserve or limit the 
bandwidth it gets - reserve to keep the workstation/laptop traffic from 
killing the server and limit so the workstation/laptop people can get some 
work done when the server is busy.

If I'm an ISP customer facing router, I probably want to give equal weight to 
each customer, probably scaled by how much bandwidth they are paying for.

I don't know how to handle backbone routers.  You probably want to treat each 
customer as a flow, again scaled by how much bandwidth they are paying for.  
But an IP level packet doesn't tell you anything about which customer it came 
from.

If this is old news, please point me at a good writeup.



-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.