[Iccrg] Is ECN too complicated?

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009, Bob Briscoe wrote:

> If ECN is still too complex, I'm at a loss (irony intended).

Well, let's put it this way:

The major core routing platforms today do not as far as I know support ECN 
at all, and these are the ones with big buffers (and support gazillions of 
queues etc). I asked for ECN support and received pushback for reason 
being "I was the only one who asked for this" (basically).

So ECN support is present in the CPU-based routers from a certain major 
vendor, but not the more ASIC/NP-accelerated ones.

So as I stated in the meeting, the ISP community is going more in the 
direction of "let's make a 100GE router/L3-switch with minimal buffers 
that never congests and upgrade to" than "let's find this platform that 
can squeeze the max out of this 10GE we already have".

DWDM-capacity is cheap, doing buffering/intelligent things in routers is 
expensive.

I can go more into detail about this if someone feels it's appropriate.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se