[Make-wifi-fast] tack - reducing acks on wlans

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Michael Welzl <michawe at ifi.uio.no> writes:

>> On 20 Oct 2021, at 12:44, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at toke.dk> wrote:
>> 
>> Michael Welzl <michawe at ifi.uio.no> writes:
>> 
>>>> On 20 Oct 2021, at 11:44, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at toke.dk> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Michael Welzl <michawe at ifi.uio.no> writes:
>>>> 
>>>>> Am I being naive? Why can't such an ARQ proxy be deployed? Is it just
>>>>> because standardizing this negotiation is too difficult, or would it
>>>>> also be too computationally heavy for an AP perhaps, at high speeds?
>>>> 
>>>> Immediate thought: this won't work for QUIC
>>> 
>>> .... as-is, true, though MASQUE is still being defined. Is this an
>>> argument for defining it accordingly?
>> 
>> MASQUE is proxying, right? Not quite sure if it's supposed to be also
>> MITM'ing the traffic?
>
> Wellllll.... I'm not 100% sure. If I understood it correctly, ideas on the table would have it do this in case of tunneling TCP/IP over QUIC, but not in case of QUIC itself - but to me, this isn't necessarily good design?  Because:  =>
>
>
>> In any case, it would require clients to negotiate
>> a proxy session with the AP and trust it to do that properly?
>
> => Yes.
>
>
>> This may
>> work for a managed setup in an enterprise, but do you really expect me
>> to be OK with any random access point in a coffee shop being a MITM?
>
> MiTM is a harsh term for just being able to ACK on my behalf. Some
> capabilities could be defined, as long as they're indeed defined
> clearly. So I don't see why "yes, you can ACK my packets on my behalf
> when you get a LL-ACK from me" is MiTM'ing. I believe that things are
> now all being lumped together, which may be why the design may end up
> being too prohibitive.

Right, okay, but even setting aside the encryption issue, you're still
delegating something that has potentially quite a significant impact on
your application's performance to an AP that (judging by the sorry state
of things today) is 5-10 years out of date compared to the software
running on your own machine. Not sure that's such an attractive
proposition?

-Toke