[Bloat] Bufferbloat on 4G Connexion

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

<erik.taraldsen at telenor.com> writes:

>> The key thing in both BQL and AQL is that instead of treating all packets the
>> same, you account for how long it will take to transmit them.
>>
>> In Wifi, your transmission rate can vary by a factor of 1000x (1Mb to over 1Gb
>> per second), so just counting bytes as BQL does is no longer good enough.
>>
>> how much does the actual over-the-air transmission rate vary in 4G? I'd bet that
>> it varies less than wifi does because wifi must retain compatibility with the
>> earliest equipment while 4G no longer supports 2G protocols.
>
> So in a scenario with a fixed (wall mounted outdoor unit) LTE device
> BQL could work quite well as the radio will not fluctuate too much.
>
> But for a mobil "pocket router" being carried around an AQL approach
> would be needed?

Having setup such an outdoor-mounted unit, I'd say that it's probably a
bit too optimistic to think that it doesn't fluctuate much. Cell
scheduling parameters (including activity from other stations), as well
as weather, can lead to quite significant fluctuations even in a
physically static setup.

So ideally, you'd want to be able to react to changes in either case.
The firmware should certainly have enough information to do that, but if
you can't get that changed, it may be possible to do something BQL-like
(either AQL, or simply a more dynamic variant of BQL) on the host.

-Toke