On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 4:27 PM Michael Welzl <michawe@ifi.uio.no> wrote:

please, please, people, take a look at the ietf taps (“transport services”) working group  :-)

I tried looking it up. It seems the TAPS WG is about building a consistent interface to different protocols in order to get a new interface rather than, say, the bsd socket interface.

But my search turned up several drafts from the WG. Did you have one in particular in mind?

I think the major reason to implement new protocols inside UDP is mainly due to a lot of existing devices out there, namely firewalls, NAT systems, and so on. The internet is extending itself by successive patching of older standards, rather than a replacement of older standards. I do note that this is how biological systems tend to work as well, but I have no good reason as to why that is what happens with internet standards where we in principle could redesign things. But perhaps already deployed stuff makes the systems susceptible to iterative patching.

The bufferbloat angle is also pretty clear: CoDel is a brilliant solution but it requires you to change queues in the network. So it seems people are trying to patch TCP instead, through something like BBR; again mimicking a biological system.

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