On 8. nov. 2013, at 11:00, Preethi Natarajan <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Naeem, all:
> 
> Please see detailed responses inline.
> 
> From: Naeem Khademi <[email protected]>
> Date: Thursday, November 7, 2013 10:50 PM
> To: Preethi Natarajan <[email protected]>
> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [aqm] AQM schemes: Queue length vs. delay based
> 
>> I fully agree with the need to have AQMs that use "queuing delay" as metric 
>> and not "queue length" and this is already a bonus for algorithms that use 
>> this metric (e.g. PIE). However, I believe that one can possibly modify RED 
>> or its derivatives (e.g. Adaptive RED) to set their thresholds based on 
>> "queuing delay" as well (although such algorithms don't exists yet as of 
>> now). Whether the outcome of these modifications to xRED algorithms would 
>> make them better than PIE and/or CoDel is another subject and I'm not going 
>> to speculate on that here. 
> 
> 
> Of course. Our initial discussions considered a latency based RED derivative. 
> We later decided to focus on a proportional integral based control law 
> instead of RED (see below for more). 
> 
>> 
>> One specific issue with PIE is that it tries to *estimate* the queuing delay 
>> over a certain time interval (t_update) and still somehow uses the "queue 
>> length" and departure rate (over the interval) to estimate the queuing 
>> delay. So saying that PIE uses the queueing delay instead of queue length 
>> may not be 100% accurate. 
> 
> 
> Any latency based scheme requires the queueing delay to work with. The fact 
> of the matter is, the queueing delay is not directly available on platforms. 
> Some platforms can afford timestamping to figure the queuing delay but not 
> all platforms  can. In fact, over the past months we've come to realize that 
> a latency based scheme is actually two different items at work — (i) the 
> control law and (ii) the mechanism which provides the queueing delay to this 
> control law. This would be true for any latency based scheme, be it, PIE, 
> CoDEL, FQ_CoDEL or xRED. Based on this observation, we plan to separate out 
> the two components in PIE, possibly in the next version of the draft. The 
> objective being that (ii) would vary with the platform and it could be direct 
> input (if platform maintains it), timestamp-based (like in CoDEL 
> derivatives), dequeue-based, or even others that we are exploring at the 
> moment. 
> 
> The current version of the PIE draft fully acknowledges the fact that what 
> PIE acquires with the dequee-based rate estimation is only an estimate of the 
> queuing delay and not the actual (Section 4.2 of v00). The larger point for 
> discussion here is a latency based AQM that uses queuing delay instead of 
> queue length. 
> 
> 
>> 
>> Moreover, in a varying bandwidth scenario, depending on how often the 
>> bandwidth changes and at what granularity, the derived "estimated queuing 
>> delay" by PIE might be an outdated information e.g. it shows how the channel 
>> has been (in term of delay) in the last 30ms and now how it is now! if I'm 
>> not mistaken that has been somehow resolved in DOCSIS 3.1 by coupling PIE's 
>> departure rate to the actual link layer rate.  
> 
> 
> We've experimented with timestamp-based delay inputs to PIE. We have not seen 
> any noticeable difference between the dequeue-based scheme and the 
> timestamp-based for all the scenarios Rong has presented at IETF thus far. 
> Even in extreme bandwidth changing conditions dequeue-based scheme can adapt 
> within few tupdate cycles. Again, PIE is flexible in its delay input 
> mechanism and will go with whatever is the best possible option available on 
> the platform. I don't think any latency based scheme can get better than that 
> :). 

An AQM scheme should also work when the bandwidth is *not* changing. The 
results that Naeem presented in ICCRG don't indicate that PIE is consistently 
better than CoDel (which is also delay-based). I'm not trying to say if this or 
that is better, just that statements like this one are rather handwavy.


>> In overall, while there are of course significant improvements made in PIE's 
>> (and (FQ)-CoDel's) design, there are probably still lessons to be learned 
>> from xRED family (check http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-38868 to see some 
>> examples). Throwing away all the knowledge and improvement gained from 
>> RED-like AQMs, CHoKe, etc and coming up with brand-new AQMs without 
>> (experimentally) comparing them to the gallery of existing ones wouldn't be 
>> great!
> 
> 
> Our initial discussions considered more than just the RED varieties. As we've 
> mentioned before, PIE is based on the concept of proportional integral (PI). 
> PI is not something we discovered. PI controller has been around for long and 
> you can refer to Hollot, Towsley et. al's paper from a decade ago for more 
> information on PI based AQM scheme. We believe PI's strong theoretical 
> stability is valuable for diverse deployment conditions and incorporated PI 
> into our PIE design. We did our own set of theoretical analysis for PIE and 
> we were proved right. You can find more details about that in our HPSR paper 
> (http://www.ieee-hpsr.org/2013/)

Another handwavy statement. Using a PI controller may be a good design idea, 
but that alone doesn't really tell us much about the overall behavior.

Cheers,
Michael

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