As TSV ADs, Martin and I have been wondering lately about AQM work. At this point, thanks largely to Jim Gettys, we all know about large buffers, and we know what bulk-transfer with loss-based congestion control can do to interactive traffic when large queues exist.
We know one thing that can be done to help is the use of AQMs, but the IETF is currently not doing a whole lot to help in this regard. There is the CoDel I-D that was discussed in the TSVAREA meeting in Vancouver: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nichols-tsvwg-codel-00 But this is an individual submission that Martin and I would be happy to sponsor, and not a working group activity. At the last IETF meeting, we had a request to talk about PIE, which we didn't have time for in TSVAREA, but ICCRG did: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-iccrg-2.ppt This was really interesting, and we wonder if the community is interested in continuing to hear about AQMs in this space, and what the IETF should be doing. If people have thoughts about this, we'd like to hear about them on this list, and/or during the TSVAREA meeting in Orlando at the next IETF meeting. We want to know what the level of interest in AQMs is, and might make this a focus of the TSVAREA meeting, if a lot of people seem to think it's a good idea. Particularly, I have wondered: - Should we have a working group looking at AQMs? - If so, does it make sense to shoot for Standards Track specifications? - Would we be able to come up with actual requirements on an AQM so that it's implementable for cheap in hardware and software, and behaves well under load? - Would it be valuable to have a test suite for AQMs similar to what ICCRG was doing for high-rate TCP? - Would it be valuable to have a BCP (or multiple) on configuring "legacy AQM" like RED, or the use of AQM metrics like "sojourn time" rather than variations of the queue length? - If any of this is of value, how much belongs in the ICCRG versus TSV working groups? Thanks for your thoughts :). -- Wes Eddy MTI Systems
