[Ecn-sane] [tsvwg] Comments on L4S drafts

[Wesley Eddy]

On 7/19/2019 11:37 AM, Dave Taht wrote:
> It's the common-q with AQM **+ ECN** that's the sticking point. I'm
> perfectly satisfied with the behavior of every ietf approved single
> queued AQM without ecn enabled. Let's deploy more of those!

Hi Dave, I'm just trying to make sure I'm reading into your message 
correctly ... if I'm understanding it, then you're not in favor of 
either SCE or L4S at all?  With small queues and without ECN, loss 
becomes the only congestion signal, which is not desirable, IMHO, or am 
I totally misunderstanding something?


> If we could somehow create a neutral poll in the general networking
> community outside the ietf (nanog, bsd, linux, dcs, bigcos, routercos,
> ISPs small and large) , and do it much like your classic "vote for a
> political measure" thing, with a single point/counterpoint section,
> maybe we'd get somewhere.

While I agree that would be really useful, it's kind of an "I want a 
pony" statement.  As a TSVWG chair where we're doing this work, we've 
been getting inputs from people that have a foot in many of the 
communities you mention, but always looking for more.


> In particular conflating "low latency" really confounds the subject
> matter, and has for years. FQ gives "low latency" for the vast
> majority of flows running below their fair share. L4S promises "low
> latency" for a rigidly defined set of congestion controls in a
> specialized queue, and otherwise tosses all flows into a higher latency
> queue when one flow is greedy.

I don't think this is a correct statement.  Packets have to be from a 
"scalable congestion control" to get access to the L4S queue.  There are 
some draft requirements for using the L4S ID, but they seem pretty 
flexible to me.  Mostly, they're things that an end-host algorithm needs 
to do in order to behave nicely, that might be good things anyways 
without regard to L4S in the network (coexist w/ Reno, avoid RTT bias, 
work well w/ small RTT, be robust to reordering).  I am curious which 
ones you think are too rigid ... maybe they can be loosened?

Also, I don't think the "tosses all flows into a higher latency queue 
when one flow is greedy" characterization is correct.  The other queue 
is for classic/non-scalable traffic, and not necessarily higher latency 
for a given flow, nor is winding up there related to whether another 
flow is greedy.


> So to me, it goes back to slamming the door shut, or not, on L4S's usage
> of ect(1) as a too easily gamed e2e identifier. As I don't think it and
> all the dependent code and algorithms can possibly scale past a single
> physical layer tech, I'd like to see it move to a DSCP codepoint, worst
> case... and certainly remain "experimental" in scope until anyone
> independent can attempt to evaluate it.

That seems good to discuss in regard to the L4S ID draft.  There is a 
section (5.2) there already discussing DSCP, and why it alone isn't 
feasible.  There's also more detailed description of the relation and 
interworking in 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-briscoe-tsvwg-l4s-diffserv-02


> I'd really all the tcp-go-fast-at-any-cost people to take a year off to
> dogfood their designs, and go live somewhere with a congested network to
> deal with daily, like a railway or airport, or on 3G network on a
> sailboat or beach somewhere. It's not a bad life... REALLY.
>
Fortunately, at least in the IETF, I don't think there have been 
initiatives in the direction of going fast at any cost in recent 
history, and they would be unlikely to be well accepted if there were!  
That is at least one place that there seems to be strong consensus.