Re: [Last-Call] [tcpm] Last Call: <draft-ietf-tcpm-rto-consider-14.txt> (Requirements for Time-Based Loss Detection) to Best Current Practice

[Mark Allman <[e-mail]>]

> There was a quote from the document: "Some protocols use
> keepalives, heartbeats or other messages to exchange control
> information."  A naive reading of this text is that it is
> discussing ways to exchange control information, and giving
> specific examples of keepalives and heartbeats as messages used to
> exchange control information (while admitting the existence of
> other such messages).  This is as surprising to me as it is to Tom
> -- keepalives and heartbeats do not, in my experience, contain
> control information!
>
> Your follow-up discussion suggests that the intent is to say that
> "some protocols use regular/periodically/frequently exchanged
> messages, such as for keepalives, heartbeats, or
> control-information exchange" and to leverage that traffic for FT
> purposes.  I suggest that this be clarified in the text of the
> document.

I tend to bin packets as either "data" or "control", which is
probably why the sentence reads like it does.  However, we don't
have to figure out who is right here.  I think the intent of the
document is to say one can scrape a FT sample from a non-data
exchange.  That is the important part and doesn't seem to be an
issue.  I have made a note to say that more directly.

Thanks,
allman