Re: Multi-path QUIC Extension Experiments

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 9/21/2021 9:37 AM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote:

> I have been maintaining a collection of various goals for path selection
> (most recently, in
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-dawkins-quic-multipath-selection-01#section-3).
> It's not a short list.
>
> If we're also including user preferences that would include knowing the
> difference between cellular connections that are metered, cellular
> connections that are unmetered but being throttled, and cellular
> connections that are unmetered and unthrottled, and cross-matching them
> with wifi connections that are likely to work better than cellular
> connections vs. wifi connections that are only intermittently performing
> well, that's not a small amount of complexity.

This leads to the problem of asymmetric knowledge between client and 
server. On the client, applications can use system APIs and user 
preferences to identify which connections are "metered, cellular 
connections that are unmetered but being throttled, and cellular 
connections that are unmetered and unthrottled." But the server side 
does not know that. Yet in many scenarios most of the traffic volume 
originates from the server, and the scheduling choices of the server may 
cause increased bills or exhaustion of quotas for the client. Which 
implies that there should be some way for the client to signal how the 
server shall consider connection.

I think this "knowledge sharing" is independent from "application 
preferences". The work at Ali Baba shows that there is a lot of benefits 
in incorporating application states in scheduling decisions. For 
example, if the video streaming application notices that the video 
buffers are emptying too fast, it might tell the server to start using 
more bandwidth, even if that means using metered connections. But that 
application state, "video buffers are emptying", is not the same as the 
network state, "path 3 is on a metered connection".

I don't think that we will be able to fully standardize the way 
applications pass their preferences. That's why in draft-liu the 
"QOE_CONTROL_SIGNALS" is mostly used to pass application-defined 
signals. But we might be able to have a reasonable set of codes (or 
priorities) explaining the "state of a path", and use that in the 
"PATH_STATUS" frame.

-- Christian Huitema