Re: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-liu-multipath-quic-01.txt

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 12/14/2020 2:38 AM, Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen wrote:

> Sorry, “async design “ should read asymmetric design, in that only one 
> endpoint can create multiple paths, as opposed to a symmetric design 
> where both can.
>
>
> On 14 December 2020 at 11.33.46, Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen 
> ([e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>) wrote:
>
>> async design

The proposal indeed keeps the asymmetric design of QUIC v1. That design 
is grounded in practical realities, such as the prevalence of NAT and 
stateful firewalls that would drop "unexpected" packets sent to a 
client. Also, the client typically knows about the cost of paths better 
than the server, for example whether sending more data on a given path 
will generate larger invoices from the provider. The design goal is to 
let the client express these preference to the server using a simple 
priority scheme.

Anything more complex probably requires application level decisions. 
That why the design provides the QOE frame. That frame let applications 
exchange information about paths in an application specific way. The 
expectation is that the application posts them as it sees fit, and the 
transport delivers them as they are received. The application then uses 
locally provided API to affect the way data is sent over multiple paths.

We could debate whether the QOE frame is needed at all. Applications 
could also exchange the data as part of application protocol itself. I 
think that having a separate frame reduce the overall complexity, by 
separating application specific path control from the application 
protocol itself.

We could also debate whether the QOE frame should be specified in 
greater details. The current design simply passes a byte string. The DNS 
SVCB RR type addresses a related problem by an SvcParams field that 
contains a list of key-value pairs. It is possible that having a similar 
list of key-value pairs would be useful there. On the other hand, we do 
not yet have a lot of experience. And open design with a byte string is 
probably good enough for now.

-- Christian Huitema