On Aug 25, 2015, at 11:46 AM, Alia Atlas <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> ECMP or downstream paths is not a research project; it is common used 
> technology.  When the traffic streams desired are larger than can fit across 
> a single path, it becomes critical.

ECMP in a homenet environment, self-configuring and reliable, is a research 
project.

> Figuring out how to handle interfering vs. non-interfering paths is, I think, 
> orthogonal to ECMP.  The multiple links
> that might interfere can easily be used for different destinations.  While 
> interesting, that seems like a problem that can needs
> solving already.  Is that piece of the problem a research project?  Figuring 
> out what links interfere?  Is this something that would need
> a centralized view of the home network?

This is not a problem that a typical end user needs solved.   You do not need 
ECMP for 4k Netflix.   You do not need ECMP to talk to your IoT devices.   You 
don’t even need ECMP to talk to your homenet file server, in the currently 
unlikely event that it’s not in the cloud (that is, in a rack in a data center 
outside the home).   ECMP might be _nice_ for the unlikely in-home file server 
case, but it is not _necessary_.   If you think it is, it’s probably because 
you are used to low-performance home routers with bufferbloat, a problem ECMP 
would not address, and likely would make worse.   We’ve all experienced the 
home router that, when you try to do a massive file transfer between two 
devices, suddenly stops routing anything else until the transfer is finished.   
This is not a problem that ECMP would fix.

What I consider to be a research project are:

- Figuring out that links interfere
- Figuring out what set of links are candidates for ECMP for a particular pair 
of endpoints
- Handling unannounced topology changes

To me this is a classic case of premature optimization.   Of course ultimately 
we’d like this to work.   But it’s not even remotely something that we care 
about _right now_.   If we ship homenet devices that do not do ECMP, nobody 
will even notice.

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