[Iccrg] Why don't we stop treating ECN and loss similarly?

[Michael Welzl]

Hi,

I wonder - what you write here seems to have an ISP-side / "inner network" flavor to it.
The bottleneck is often the last mile. So often it's perhaps more important what my modem does than what ISPs do inside their network somewhere... there, turning on ECN can't be such a big deal, as e.g. the buffer bloat folks are putting (FQ_)CoDel in their CeroWrt?

Cheers,
Michael


On 29. okt. 2012, at 09:56, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Oct 2012, Michael Welzl wrote:
> 
>> Perhaps some of the ideas for reacting to a finer-grain ECN signal will lead to an answer to that.
> 
> As far as I can tell, ECN has decent end-system support, but very limited network support. I don't know of any major core routing platform that supports setting ECN in a RED configuration instead of dropping the packet (last I checked this was 1.5 years ago, but talking to vendors indicated very little interest).
> 
> I'm also seeing buffer depth going down over time (see bufferbloat discussion, plus prolifiration of L3 switches with minimal onboard buffers instead of larger classical router ones), which means that it's even harder than before to justify ECN as nothing in a live network will really act on ECN being used or not by the end system. If someone else has other information, I'd like to know.
> 
> Perhaps it would be valuable to write some text about the state of ECN support right now, and then a plan to increase value for ECN so we can get it adopted. Current state of affairs is that few care about ECN because nobody is asking for it (same as with IPv6), so there is little commercial incentive to get it implemented. I feel most talk about ECN is from academia with little current real world implications. I'd like to see this changed, but I don't really know how. Changing the standards to implementing ECN actually brings improvement to both ISP and end user might be a good first step towards a world where ECN is actually used.
> 
> -- 
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se
> 
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