Delay-gradient congestion control

"Very cool, these people invented a congestion control algorithm that the bufferbloat crowd claimed was impossible. Really looking forward to a packet loss-less Internet."

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that. Rather (I at least) have always pointed at every improvement in host tcps and driver infrastructure in every talk - BQL, TSQ, sch_fq's pacing, deprecating hystart, TSO/GSO/GRO sizing fixes, Quic, etc - as both needed and useful - and arguably sch_fq (which builds on all that) has had a far greater benefit thus far than all the work on fq and AQM combined.

Certainly there is a huge bias (based on the experimental evidence) that classic delay based tcps lost out to loss based in an undeployable fashion for most connections - but, for example, I would not mind a delay based tcp on 3g mobile handsets as a specialized use case. I know of some new CC algorithms that look *really* promising in other cases... and...

I welcome new attempts at making tcps better (or building, as I have thought, new protocols like quic that had a touch more awareness of the underlying link layer's properties, wireless or wired)...

and plan to test this new tcp as soon as I have time to do a recompile. (well, it looks like there have been quite a bit of feedback on it on the list)

As for packet-loss-free internet, well, I deployed ECN fully at multiple sites over the past few years, and am very close to that, already, and all people have to do to get there is turn ECN on in their tcp's and aqms, which is down to a couple sysctls now.

There are still some details regarding ECN to sort out, notably how to handle overload better, see cake and the latest fq_codel code for that.

http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Enable_ECN

And lastly, still, I remain dubious about any form of e2e congestion control as the be-all-end-all solution. TCP-ers tend to crow with excitement when they can get results with 100-150ms of induced delay. With AQMs on the routers, we got in the 20-100ms range, and with fq, down to near zero for most traffic types we cared about. This was exciting enough to make the big push needed to try and fix the routers - knowing full well how hard it would be - worldwide... for 4.5 years now.

The combination of a world with fq+aqm+ecn + better e2e congestion control remains to be more fully explored. I have pointed out that in particular fq gives coupled flows (e.g. bittorrent, some videoconferencing stuff) a much better signal (clock) to measure against, but there has been very little (public) work in this area.

My focus these days is on applying all that we have learned about e2e, aqm, fq, ecn, etc, as best as we can, to dramatically improve wifi behaviors, with "make-wifi-fast".

"The bufferbloat community has been surprisingly successful",

I am shocked, myself. When we started I had no hope. I thought we were doomed to watching tv over the internet, only. It was a windmill I wanted to tilt at, and I had some spare time to do it....

In fact, when the first ideas for fixing wifi didn't work out back in late 2011, I had *quit*, and was looking for a "real" job, then about 2 weeks later - I somewhat randomly picked up on BQL (Which was a set of patches that had died on the vine 5 or so months prior)... and it worked! It had fundamental insights into everything we were doing wrong... and things have been building ever since. I think over the next year we are going to see a huge change in internet latency under load across hundreds of millions of connections, especially now that speedtest sites like dslreports are adding bufferbloat measurements.

Sometimes I am grateful to tom herbert for BQL, other times I kind of resent the invention of it, because I could have just gone back to a beach and surfed a few more years and ignored the internet a while longer.

"but it seems so much easier to change congestion control in a few major (endpoint) operating systems, rather than to fix buffer accounting and in tens/hundreds of middlebox vendors."

Hah. Finding anyone with a pulse at microsoft, BSD, or apple has been very difficult.