[Bloat] Detecting bufferbloat from outside a node

[Neil Davies]

Toke

Absolutely - the individual nodes can make (locally informed) decisions as to how to “behave”.

The interesting thing is making all those local decisions add up to a (set of) end-to-end outcomes, and the
answer is not to make the same decision(s) everywhere - unfortunately that doesn’t stack up.

We have (some level) of control over our “universe of discourse” - my joke with my mates at CERN is that
they only have one universe to investigate, we can create three in one day and still be home in time for tea!

Neil

On 27 Apr 2015, at 11:32, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at toke.dk> wrote:

> Neil Davies <neil.davies at pnsol.com> writes:
> 
>> You are asking about the epistemology! Good start. The only things you
>> can “know” outside the node are the things you can observe. You can
>> infer, from the characteristics of the observations, conformance to
>> some avowed model of behaviour.
> 
> If we're going all philosophy of science on this, I'll add that the nice
> thing about networking is that the computers attached to it can give us
> some very specific measurements and we can (with care) provoke quite
> specific behaviour to reason about the performance. Try asking a
> biologist about the interactions between the life cycle of parasitic
> species, their hosts and the ecosystem they live in! :)
> 
> -Toke