North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Congestion control train-wreck workshop at Stanford: Call for Demos

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Mon Sep 03 23:34:02 2007

On Mon, 3 Sep 2007, Steven M. Bellovin wrote: 
Is there a groundswell of *operators* who think TCP should be
replaced, and believe it can be replaced?

Or is the motivation for replacing TCP mainly felt by those who spend
a lot of time trying to get maximum performance out of single flows
over high bandwidth-delay product paths?

Operators speak IP, not TCP -- not your problem...

Operators like inefficient protocols :-)

Operators are probably more interested in the "fairness" part of
"congestion" than the "efficiency" part of "congestion."  And of course
the dreaded congestive collapse.

More seriously -- the question is whether new services will cause
operator congestion problems that today's mechanisms don't handle.
It's also possible, per the note that some solutions will have operator
implications, such as new tuning knobs for routers and/or new funky new
DNS records to make it clear which hosts support TCP++.  Beyond that,
there are likely implications for things like firewalls, ACLs, and
service measurements.

I think its interesting because its an attempt to define what the problem is, and demostrate that problem exists. The next phase would be can those
conditions actually occur in the real world.