Re: [aqm] Document Action: 'The Benefits of using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-aqm-ecn-benefits-08.txt)

[Steve Baillargeon <[e-mail]>]

Hi
Sorry to come so late with a comment.
Is it too late to add one more benefit to the draft?

I suspect ECN brings potential and significant savings in CPU cycles and memory usage , especially on the "server side" terminating a large number of TCP connections.
Has anyone done any analysis to confirm or contradict this assumption?

Regards
Steve Baillargeon
Ericsson


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Subject: [aqm] Document Action: 'The Benefits of using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-aqm-ecn-benefits-08.txt)

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'The Benefits of using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)'
  (draft-ietf-aqm-ecn-benefits-08.txt) as Informational RFC

This document is the product of the Active Queue Management and Packet Scheduling Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Spencer Dawkins and Martin Stiemerling.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-aqm-ecn-benefits/





Technical Summary

This document is mostly a list of demonstrated and expected benefits to transport protocols by using ECN. It highlights points that are most visible to the application layer within the end-points. It then goes on discussing specific deployment scenarios of ECN in a network, and the internet at scale. 

The key benefits of running ECN are summarized as
o) Improved throughput                                 
o) Reduced Head-of-Line blocking                       
o) Reduced probability of RTO Expiry                   
o) Applications that do not retransmit lost packets    
o) Making incipient congestion visible                 
o) Opportunities for new transport mechanisms  

Working Group Summary

The document was brought to the working group to highlight and underline the many benefits ECN can have, if deployed at scale. During the WG discussions, the character of the draft changed slightly, from looking only at the positive implications to also describe potential drawbacks and pitfalls.

The intention of this document though is less technical in nature, and instead is intended as a reference as to why deploying ECN at this time would be sensible. 
It aims to be a manifest that can be shown to decision-makers who quickly need to understand the key benefits of ECN, with a high level of technical guidance.

Document Quality

Are there existing implementations of the protocol? 

The document is agnostic of any specific implementation, and rather argues about the architectural model (well, as supported by the IP protocol) to use ECN. Implementations of ECN in TCP (RFC3168) are in wide-spread use, but with the ECN capabilities disabled, or only passively enabled. Arguably, the document helped to persuade decision-maker at a large vendor to actively start deploying ECN.
 


Have a significant number of vendors indicated their plan to implement the 
specification? 

The document aims to achieve just that - to drive the adoption rate of a well
known and available protocol by vendors up.


Are there any reviewers that merit special mention as having done a thorough 
review, e.g., one that resulted in important changes or a conclusion that the 
document had no substantive issues? 

There were lively discussions in the AQM working group around this document.
First, to not only speak exclusively about the positive aspects, but also 
mention potential issues. Second, that document had widespread support in the WG
as it preaches to the choir - but word has to be spread about ECN to a larger
audience.
Personnel


Who is the Document Shepherd? 
Richard Scheffenegger, AQM WG co-chair

Who is the Responsible Area Director?
Martin Stiemerling, Transport AD

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