Re: [bmwg] draft-lencse-bmwg-benchmarking-stateful

[Gábor LENCSE <[e-mail]>]

Dear Edwin Cordeiro,

Thank you very much for your review and support!

I would like to note regarding testing with TCP that all RFC 2544, RFC 
5180 and also RFC 8219 recommends testing with UDP.

Additional testing with TCP seems to be feasible, but it requires some 
considerations and design decisions. For example, whereas you can simply 
send UDP datagrams as test traffic, but you need to establish a TCP 
connection first. The 3-way handshake may be done during the preliminary 
phase, and one can send TCP segments as test traffic in the real test phase.
However, it is does not seem trivial to me, how deeply the Tester should 
follow the TCP protocol.
On the one hand, perfectly implementing all the rules of the TCP 
protocol would impose a lot of limitations on the Tester, thus it would 
not be able to send test frames at the required rates. This would 
prohibit the execution of the benchmarking tests like throughput, frame 
loss rate, latency etc, :-(
On the other hand, normal routers do not look into the TCP protocol 
header, but NAT boxes do. Thus sending TCP segments with improper 
Sequence number, Acknowledgement number, etc. fields could result in 
different problems in the DUT depending on how deeply it follows the TCP 
protocol.

Best regards,

Gábor

24/05/2021 13:51 keltezéssel, Edwin Cordeiro írta:
> Dear authors of draft-lencse-bmwg-benchmarking-stateful,
>
> I agree with the motivation and ideas of the draft and I support its 
> adoption.
>
> I recommend that the TCP considerations for such benchmarking 
> methodology should not be left for a future document, as TCP still is 
> the most used protocol. So, the details on TCP difficulties and an 
> extension of this benchmark to consider TCP, should be in the scope of 
> this document.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Edwin Cordeiro
>
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