[Bloat] Credit and/or collaboration on a responsiveness metric?

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 6 Jul, 2021, at 2:21 am, Matt Mathis <mattmathis at google.com> wrote:
> 
> The rounds based responsiveness metric is awesome!   There are several slightly different versions, with slightly different properties....
> 
> I would like to write a little paper (probably for the IAB workshop), but don't want to short change anybody else's credit, or worse, scoop somebody else's work in progress.   I don't really know if I am retracing somebody else's steps, or on a parallel but different path (more likely).   I would be really sad to publish something and then find out later that I trashed some PhD students' thesis....

It's possible that I had some small influence in originating it, although Dave did most of the corporate marketing.

My idea was simply to express delays and latencies as a frequency, in Hz, so that "bigger numbers are better", rather than always in milliseconds, where "smaller numbers are better".  The advantage of Hz is that you can directly compare it to framerates of video or gameplay.

Conversely, an advantage of "rounds per minute" is that you don't need to deal with fractions or rounding for relatively modest and common levels of bloat, where latencies of 1-5 seconds are typical.

I'm not overly concerned with taking credit for it, though.  It's a reasonably obvious idea to anyone who takes a genuine interest in this field, and other people did most of the hard work.

> Please let me know if you know of anybody else working in this space, of any publications that might be in progress or if people might be interested in another collaborator.

There are two distinct types of latency that RPM can be used to measure, and I have written a short Internet Draft describing the distinction:

	https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-morton-tsvwg-interflow-intraflow-delays-00.html

Briefly, "inter-flow delays" (or BFID) are what you measure with an independent latency-measuring flow, and "intra-flow delays" (or WFID) are what you measure by inserting latency probes into an existing flow (whether at the protocol level with HTTP2, or by extracting it from existing application activity).  The two typically differ when the path bottleneck has a flow-isolating queue, or when the application flow experiences loss and retransmission recovery.

I think both measures are important in different contexts.  An individual application may be concerned with its own intra-flow delay, as that determines how quickly it can respond to changes in network conditions or user intent.  Network engineers should be concerned with inter-flow delays, as those determine what effect a bulk application load has on other, more latency-sensitive applications.  The two are also optimally controlled by different mechanisms - FQ versus AQM - which is why the combination of the two is so powerful.

Feel free to use material from the above with appropriate attribution.

 - Jonathan Morton