Greetings, all,

I've proposed a lightning talk on this subject for Dubai, but it occurred to me 
that this working group might be a better place to answer this question: how 
prevalent is the use of passive latency measurement (e.g., by looking at DNS 
request/response times, or TCP seq-ack / timestamp delays) in everyday network 
operations, and for what is it commonly used?

I ask this question in the context of a very specific design proposal before 
the IETF's QUIC working group. QUIC encrypts almost all of its header 
information beyond that needed for its crypto handshake, which makes equivalent 
techniques to those used in TCP impossible: you see no ACK numbers, and no 
timestamps, so it's impossible to match an upstream QUIC packet with its 
downstream counterpart.

However, a recently proposed addition to the spec 
(https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/pull/609) would add a single bit to the 
header which would be explicitly intended for passive round trip time 
measurement. Since this adds a small amount of complexity to the wire image, 
one useful piece of input to the decision whether or not to add this 
measurability is how useful it is, in terms of operational impact of having 
passive measurability go away as TCP flows are replaced by QUIC flows.

Thanks, cheers,

Brian

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