Generally agree. That said, the Conex work has suggested that ECN marking or 
thresholds might operate differently depending on the DSCP. As a 
manufacturer/implementor, my comment is that all things are possible to him who 
doesn't have to do it. However, I "get" that for elastic traffic "congestion 
experienced" might be defined as "delay, or projected delay, exceeded some 
threshold", while for a class of real-time traffic it might be defined as 
"octet throughput rate within this class exceeds some threshold".

On Dec 6, 2013, at 7:22 AM, "Robinson, Dave C (Dave)" 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Jim et al,
> 
> I agree with your comments on Diffserv. I'd go further and characterise 
> Diffserv as a business tool whereas ECN and general AQMs as network 
> optimisation tools. By that I mean that Diffserv should be used by an 
> application to specify a business policy be it low latency for VoIP / gaming 
> or preferred forwarding for your video service. AQMs can guess at the types 
> of traffic. For example an isochronous flow of short packets could well be 
> VoIP which would benefit from expedited forwarding. But it has to be an 
> operator policy to decide between two VoIP services. 
> 
> Same argument for bulk traffic from different video services. One can be a 
> partner traffic from your internal CDN nodes which you would like to 
> accelerate through your network.
> 
> ECN is a good tools to use to tell sources the the network is becoming 
> overloaded and is kinder than dropping packets. But it cannot know the 
> business policy. Just help manage congestion.
> 
> Regards
>       Dave
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> On 5 Dec 2013, at 19:50, Jim Gettys <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Bob Briscoe <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Fred, Gorry, all,
>> 
>> I promised to suggest text for draft-ietf-aqm-recommendation about allowing 
>> the AQM's behaviour to be independent for ECN and non-ECN packets. In the 
>> process, I realised we can't talk about independent AQMs for ECN without 
>> also including Diffserv.
>> 
>> This gets messy, because I believe a good AQM for BE traffic with and 
>> without ECN, should remove much if not all the need for Diffserv. But we 
>> can't ignore Diffserv.
>> 
>> I agree in principle with what Bob is trying to say here (and is very much 
>> what I've been saying in my blog entry of last summer).
>> 
>> Once you have things under control, the need for Diffserv diminishes 
>> dramatically (but does not go away).
>> 
>> But as Bob notes, there is still a good use for Diffserv: suitably marked 
>> traffic may want to contend for access to the channel differently: your 
>> marked VOIP packets may want to change the priority with which you request 
>> channel access, so that you get more timely access to the medium. This 
>> conserves transmit opportunities, which is often the scarcest resource in 
>> many systems (e.g. 802.11, DOCSIS, etc.). This can be the difference between 
>> your VOIP working well, and not working well, on a busy 802.11 network as 
>> well as using the channel as efficiently as possible.
>> 
>> Similarly, if you have packets you know are background, it's helpful to know 
>> that to ensure that they never contend for access to the medium but will 
>> always defer to other traffic, and just scavenge available space in other 
>> transmit opportunities where possible.
>> 
>> I'm a bit loathe though to tie the behavior to queues, however; in 
>> particular, best effort traffic may want to be sent in the same aggregate as 
>> higher (or lower) priority traffic, if there is remaining space in the 
>> aggregate.  
>> 
>> In short, the mental model we've had that there is a one-to-one model of 
>> hardware and software queues (not to mention flows in a given software 
>> queue) is often incorrect (or at least seriously sub-optimal) in today's 
>> systems (even if the hardware queues "work" properly, which it appears they 
>> do not in 802.11).
>> 
>> So I'm not sure Bob's new section 3 here is how to best to state this (or to 
>> deal with the terminology problem).  Certainly, it may be the same instance 
>> of an AQM algorithm, rather than different instances, for example.  And " It 
>> SHOULD be possible" is more a pious wish than anything else.  But I agree in 
>> spirit with what Bob's trying to say.
>>                                - Jim
>> 
>> 
>> _________________________________________________________________________________________
>> {In Section 4: add another bullet between recommendations 2 & 3:}
>> 
>> 3{New}. It SHOULD be possible to make different instances of an AQM 
>> algorithm apply to different subsets of packets that share the same queue. 
>> It SHOULD be possible to classify packets into these subsets at least by ECN 
>> codepoint [RFC3168] and Diffserv codepoint [RFC2474] (or the equivalent of 
>> these fields at lower layers).
>> 
>> {Then a new section to expand on this before the current Section 4.3.}
>> 4.3{New}. Independent AQM Instances for ECN and Diffserv
>> 
>> The recommendation to provide a separate instance of the AQM for ECN packets 
>> goes beyond the assumptions of RFC 3168, which assumed that only one 
>> instance of an AQM will handle both ECN-capable and non-ECN-capable packets.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ________________________________________________________________
>> Bob Briscoe,                                                  BT  
>> _______________________________________________
>> aqm mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/aqm
>> 


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