[Bloat] [e2e] [aqm] What is a good burst? -- AQM evaluation guidelines

[Bob Briscoe]

Fred,

Jonathan Morton, Michael Scharf & I took Naeem's question to mean 
"What should an AQM assume the size of a good burst is?" whereas I 
think you and David C-B took the question to mean "What should an 
end-system take the size of a good burst to be?".

Naeem, could you clarify which you were asking?


Bob

At 21:42 15/12/2013, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:

>On Dec 14, 2013, at 9:35 PM, Naeem Khademi <naeem.khademi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi all
> >
> > I'm not sure if this has already been covered in any of the other 
> threads, but looking at 
> http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/88/slides/slides-88-aqm-5.pdf and 
> draft-ietf-aqm-recommendation-00, the question remains: "what is a 
> good burst (size) that AQMs should allow?" and/or "how an AQM can 
> have a notion of the right burst size?".
> >
> > and how "naturally-occuring bursts" mentioned in 
> draft-ietf-aqm-recommendation-00 can be defined?
>
>
>Imagine, if you will, that you have a host and a network in front of 
>it including a first hop switch or router.The host gas a TCP offload 
>engine, which is a device that accepts a large chunk of data and 
>sends as much of it as it has permission to send as quickly as it 
>can. The host has, for sake of argument, a 10 MBPS interface, and 
>everything else in the network has interfaces whose rate are 
>measured in gigabits. The host gives its TSO one chunk of data, so 
>that can't  be called a "burst" - it's one message. The TSO sends 
>data as quickly as it can, but presumably does little more than keep 
>the transmission system operating without a pause; while it might 
>queue up 45 messages at a crack, there is no requirement that it do 
>so, so the term "burst" there doesn't have a lot of meaning. And as 
>the data moves through the network, the rate of the particular 
>session is absolutely lost in the available capacity. So a burst, in 
>the sense of the definition, never happens.
>
>Now, repeat the experiment. However, in this case the host as a 
>gig-E interface, and the next interface that its router uses is 10 
>or 100 MBPS. The host and its TSO, and for that matter the router, 
>do exactly the same thing. As perceived by the router, data is 
>arriving much more quickly than it is leaving, resulting in a 
>temporarily deep queue. If the propagation delay through the 
>remainder of the network and the destination host are appropriate, 
>acknowledgements could arrive at the TSO, soliciting new 
>transmissions, before that queue empties. In that case, it is very 
>possible that the queue remains full for a period of time. This 
>network event could last for quite some time.
>
>The second is clearly a burst, according to the definition, and I 
>would argue that it is naturally occurring.
>
>I imagine you have heard Van and/or Kathy talk about "good queue" vs 
>"bad queue". "Good queue" keeps enough traffic in it to fully 
>utilize its egress. "Bad queue" also does so, but does so in a 
>manner that also materially increases measured latency. This 
>difference is what is behind my comment on the objective of a 
>congestion management algorithm (such as TCP's but not limited to 
>it) that its objective is to keep the amount of data outstanding 
>large enough to maximize its transmission rate through the network, 
>but not so large as to materially increase measured latency or 
>probability of loss.
>
>I would argue that this concept of "Good Queue" is directly relevant 
>to the concept of an acceptable burst size. In the first 
>transmission in a session, the sender has no information about what 
>it will experience, so it behoves it to behave in a manner that is 
>unlikely to create a significant amount of "bad queue" - 
>conservatively. But it by definition has no numbers by which to 
>quantify that. Hence, we make recommendations about the initial 
>window size. After that, I would argue that it should continue to 
>behave in a manner that doesn't led to "bad queue", but is free to 
>operate in any manner that seeks to keep the amount of data 
>outstanding large enough to maximize its transmission rate through 
>the network, but not so large as to materially increase measured 
>latency or probability of loss. At the point that it sends data in a 
>manner that creates a sustained queue, it has exceeded what would be 
>considered a useful burst size.

________________________________________________________________
Bob Briscoe,                                                  BT