Re: [aqm] TCP ACK Suppression

"Richard Scheffenegger" <rs.ietf@gmx.at> Wed, 07 October 2015 16:05 UTC

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From: Richard Scheffenegger <rs.ietf@gmx.at>
To: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>, "Bless, Roland (TM)" <roland.bless@kit.edu>
References: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1510060748480.8750@uplift.swm.pp.se> <D2394BB6.548C5%g.white@cablelabs.com> <0A452E1DADEF254C9A7AC1969B8781284A7D9B66@FR712WXCHMBA13.zeu.alcatel-lucent.com> <5614D4B8.5060403@kit.edu> <alpine.DEB.2.02.1510071246550.8750@uplift.swm.pp.se>
Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2015 17:57:38 +0200
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Cc: "LAUTENSCHLAEGER, Wolfram (Wolfram)" <wolfram.lautenschlaeger@alcatel-lucent.com>, Greg White <g.white@CableLabs.com>, aqm@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [aqm] TCP ACK Suppression
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[as individual]

Hi Mikael,

ACK thinning will interfere with the ACK clock of the sender; a good recipie 
to require much more buffering at the bottlneck hop of that session (since 
the sender will start bursting out TCP data packets at it's line rate, 
rather than the bottleneck link rate).

So, if your goal is to have the sender send out TCP data segments at the 
bottleneck rate, you'd not want to ACK too many segments at once...

Of course, the drawback is your observation, that TCP (over Ethernet) 
typically requires 64 bytes of ACK per 2x 1448 bytes, or about 1:45 
uplink/downlink bandwidth).

Others have already pointed out some relevant RFCs in this thread too...

Best regards,
  Richard

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mikael Abrahamsson" <swmike@swm.pp.se>
To: "Bless, Roland (TM)" <roland.bless@kit.edu>
Cc: "LAUTENSCHLAEGER, Wolfram (Wolfram)" 
<wolfram.lautenschlaeger@alcatel-lucent.com>; "Greg White" 
<g.white@CableLabs.com>; <aqm@ietf.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2015 12:51 PM
Subject: Re: [aqm] TCP ACK Suppression


> On Wed, 7 Oct 2015, Bless, Roland (TM) wrote:
>
>> Oh, I hope that this is an exception. Such kind of optimizations may 
>> cause a lot of trouble since a link layer device is interfering with 
>> transport layer semantics. We all know that exactly these kinds of 
>> interference eventually end up in problems with end-to-end transparency 
>> and deployment of new protocol options. At least it interferes with the 
>> ACK clocking expectation of some congestion control algorithms...
>
> Personally, I think you're going to see more and more of this. There are 
> mulitple shared access medium where you're allowed to send only part of 
> the time, and it's someone else who tells you when you may send.
>
> So if you're sitting there with 100 ACK packets all nicely ACKing 
> increasing values indicating no packet loss, and now you're allowed to 
> send, why not just kill 99 of those ACK packets?
>
> While I agree with you on principle, these kinds of mechanisms cut the 
> amount of ACK traffic down by factor 15-30, meaning I can download at 250 
> megabit/s and only have a few hundred kilobit/s of upstream ACKs, instead 
> of 5-10 megabit/s of ACKs. That's a huge opimization for any kind of 
> asymmetric and/or time slot access medium such as ADSL, LTE, DOCSIS, PON 
> and I'm sure there are others.
>
> Btw, what is the reason for TCP doing ACKs for every 2 packets in 
> steady-state, even with window sizes in the hundreds of kilobytes or even 
> megabytes? I would prefer if the TCP host stack sent fewer ACKs instead of 
> trying to optimize this at the access routing device.
>
> -- 
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se
>
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