[Ecn-sane] My (controversial) position paper on TCP

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019, Dave Taht wrote:

> Another ietf idea that makes me crazy is the motto of "no host changes" 
> in homenet, and "dumb endpoints" - when we live in an age where we have 
> quad cores and AI coprocessors in everybody's hands.

This isn't a resource problem, it's a code problem. The IETF wants 10-15 
year old hosts to be able to connect to a network and perform basic 
networking. It might not be very optimized, but the basic function should 
be there. New functionality can optimize for different factors, but making 
older host stop working is frowned upon.

If the endpoints are going to be smarter (and they will, question is how 
fast), how do we keep the smarts updated with new functionality?

TCP does the same thing, it wants to be backwards compatible and that's 
why QUIC has been more free to innovate in some fashions. I also believe 
it's perhaps time to cut TCP off and come up with something new, the bad 
part is that it seems all innovation then has to be done over UDP which 
has its own drawbacks (because of NATs).

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se