[e2e] TCP ex Machina

[Jon Crowcroft]

I'm sorry, but this smacks of "orthodoxy" 
which is anathema to good science.

the reality is that the nature of
most of the "optimization" work that makes it into good conferences
(nsdi, icnp, sigcomm, pick your fave)
are in the nature of the word you use - extensions  

they do not "sidestep" anything - they change the behaviour in the
situation where the extesion applies and not otherwise, and are
typically "backwards compatible" as much as possible, as the one
true orthodoxy that is around is that any decent paper evaluates
the tcp-atlantis or tcp-erewhon both in the new scenario, and in a
mix with tcp-vanilla or tcp-realworld, to see what the impact of
each on the other is, because thats what scientists do when they do
their evaluation properly - they want to know what happens in the
real world, not just in some bubble world

however, it is also legitimate science 
to ask what happens in some brave new world,
if one has the capability to change everything -

some of these brave new worlds aren't small - 
they are places like all cell phones, 
or in a data center with a few million cores,
where one might actually have the capability 
to have a flag day
(ship the tcp-flagrante to all devices and enable)...

that new world might not share the same primary goal - 

for example, in some data center it might be 
perfectly reasonable to sidestep your goal 
as the modest owner of the data center might actually
want to maximise total crosssectional throughput 
for some odd reason...

I just dont buy the homogenous trope any more - 
what is more, we have dynamic systems that 
rebuild, relink, reload, reboot - 
we can decide which is the appropriate behaviour - 
indeed, many of these systems do this anyhow at some level 
(when switching from wifi to 3g/4g, 
when switching from hadoop using tcp to do reduce/shuffle phase, 
to video streaming over tcp to a customer - 
in lots of other cases)

for these people, 
what is wrong with experimenting and publishing
papers on the results of the experiments? it would be wrong
not to publically propose and expose evaluations of these
extensions or modifications.

in any case, 
TCP and IP were not perfect at birth 
through some sort of intelligent design 
which magically foresaw all these new scenarios- 

they were prototypes that expressed some very cool ideas, 
but missed some details and I believe we learned some new stuff
since anyhow...

so of course there might be extensions which would kick in, 
in the wrong circumstances and do harm - 

so do you believe any OS vendor or 
community would ship those? 

do you believe that unless the papers about them showed a net win, 
anyone would use them? 

do you think we shouldn't propose ideas, 
that occasionally turn out to be wrong? 
how else will things move on?

in any case, the TCP ex Machina paper isn't this at all
so on the topic of evolving (and evaluating in a complex rich way)
new variants of CC, I think one way you could think about this paper
is the following

instead of waiting a duty cycle of 1 grad-student-year for a next
TCP congestion control idea, 
you use a big cluster of machines and evolutionary computing
to run at the rate of around 100 graduate students-per-week
and pick the best according to some metric - 

you could, if you like, pick a different metric - Fred's proposed
one  - that's fine - the paper just illustrates that we have a
capability to do some thing which was probably rather difficult to
consider in 1976 or 1988 (pick your preferred incept date here)...

I'd quite like DNS lookup and search to go faster anyhow- but i
dont think the people working on that want the download times of
the PDFs of their papers to slow down or be unrelable as a
result...

Do you have specific examples of work that would do that?

cheers
jon


In missive <51F19708.3050206 at isi.edu>, Joe Touch typed:

 >>FWIW, I've been concerned about a number of proposed "extensions" to 
 >>TCP, either to optimize it for DNS (TCP-CT) or for Google (various).
 >>
 >>My concern is because these optimizations sidestep my view of the 
 >>primary goal of TCP as described below.
 >>
 >>Joe
 >>
 >>On 7/25/2013 2:00 PM, Joe Touch wrote:
 >>>
 >>>
 >>> On 7/21/2013 11:35 PM, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
 >>>> But I think maximizing throughput while minimizing the probability of
 >>>> loss is probably the holy grail.
 >>>
 >>> It also depends on whether you measure that as an individual or as a group.
 >>>
 >>> I tend to think of TCP as supporting the most participants having
 >>> reliable communication as a primary goal, and a secondary goal to
 >>> maximize (though not optimize) the aggregate data per unit time --
 >>> subject to the primary goal.
 >>>
 >>> I.e., it's not about max BW for a given connection, and it also almost
 >>> never means minimizing the transfer time for a single connection.
 >>>
 >>> Joe

 cheers

   jon