[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[David P. Reed]

So let me suggest that the nice thing about the Internet is that in 
general, the core of the network doesn't care about the details of the 
end-to-end protocols that users deploy in their machines.

There is much anxiety about "congestion control" and "fairness", of 
course.  But ultimately, the network , the IETF, and the access 
providers that provide the last 10 meters are not the arbiters of such 
things. (in fact, the point is that the end users collectively have much 
more knowledge about what they are trying to do than the network 
routers, owners, and standardizers ever can).  Thus, the end users 
ultimately get involved in the definition of what's fair, once they've 
paid for the right to originate packets to each other.

Yeah, if the end users decide to get in fights among themselves, they 
get into fights.  It's simple as that.  It's no different than Pakistan 
or Kenya today.   If enough of the people decide that they want to have 
a civil war, the government is not going to stop them.

Fortunately, people are generally sensible after a while.   Companies 
like Microsoft and projects like Linux generally can help by not 
creating self-sustaining catastrophic protocol structures and 
disseminatng them.   But generally they don't for long.

Bluetooth and WiFi protocols were at risk of jamming each other.  But 
realizing that that would not do anyone any good, they came up with a 
pragmatic set of ameliorations.   Those were hardly "optimum", but in 
practice they worked well enough.

If CUBIC turns out to be an actual nightmare, Linux has ways to 
distribute updates that ameliorate the problem.   I doubt it will get 
that bad in practice - Linux users are still pretty thin, and they do 
tend to download and apply patches much more rapidly than any other 
class of system users on the planet.



Randy Bush wrote:
>>> But who decides whether a protocol is experimental, or good enough
>>> for production use?
>> That's supposed to happen in the IETF. The protocol in question is
>> being purported as experimental, not optional standards-track.
>
> a protocol is experimental when someone is trying to convince us to 
> try it and giving us the code to do so on common platform(s).  (before 
> then, it's just hot air)
>
> a protocol is production when customers want it and are willing to pay
> for at least the costs of deploying it.
>
> btw, what's "the IETF?" [0]
>
> randy
>
> ---
>
> [0] - http://rip.psg.com/~randy/051000.sigcomm-ivtf.pdf
>