On 4 Jun, 2012, at 4:32 am, Haiqing Jiang wrote:

> It's really excited to find the new direction to tackle bufferbloat, on TCP 
> layer instead of routers (like AQM). The bufferbloat problem actually seems 
> to be the most prominent, comparing with other networks. 
> Therefore, we suggest the more efforts to tackling bufferbloat problem in 
> cellular networks and seeking a good solution in TCP layer space.

I read the paper quickly, and this seems to be a good use of TCP timestamps.  
It thus represents an additional way to solve (or at least mitigate) the 
problem in cases where the managers of bottleneck links are unwilling or unable 
to implement AQM.

If you look far enough back in the list archives - search for "Blackpool", for 
example - you'll see that I implemented a somewhat cruder solution using the 
same basic mechanism - limiting the receive window to prevent a single TCP 
stream from attempting to occupy the entire buffer.  It was cruder because it 
simply chose a window size based on the bandwidth of the flow and an empirical 
relationship between bandwidth and last-mile-hop latency, and didn't attempt to 
use timestamps.  It made a big difference for traffic from my local cell tower 
to a desktop Linux machine.

May I ask what happens if TCP timestamps are not available for a particular 
flow, particularly one that competes with a timestamped flow?  Such crude 
stacks are probably getting less common now, but they undoubtedly still exist.

It would also be interesting to investigate what happens when your scheme 
competes with a number of LEDBAT based flows (eg. uTP), both with and without 
AQM in place.

 - Jonathan Morton

_______________________________________________
Bloat mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat

Reply via email to