Re: Using varints to encode the Transport Parameters

Dmitri Tikhonov <dtikhonov@litespeedtech.com> Mon, 29 October 2018 12:48 UTC

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Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2018 08:48:36 -0400
From: Dmitri Tikhonov <dtikhonov@litespeedtech.com>
To: Marten Seemann <martenseemann@gmail.com>
Cc: QUIC WG <quic@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: Using varints to encode the Transport Parameters
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I see two problems with this proposal: timing and size.

This is rather late in the game.  If the Working Group is to follow
the plan Martin Thomson outlined in a recent email, this change would
have to be included into -17.

A hybrid of the TLS Presentation language and QUIC varints has to be
specified somewhere itself, thereby increasing the size of the already
hefty transport document.  This new specification, in turn, is likely
to engender some debate and further optimization proposals.  Allowed
to go unchecked, this work would slip our schedule further.

One way to approach this proposal is to have a ready-to-merge PR and
hum it at the upcoming meeting.

  - Dmitri.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 06:13:50PM +0700, Marten Seemann wrote:
> This is based on issue https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/1608.
> 
> The proposal is to change the encoding of the QUIC Transport Parameters
> exchanged during the handshake, in order to achieve greater consistency
> with how QUIC encodes values, and also to save a few bytes.
> 
> We have a few things that are called transport parameters. This proposal
> only applies to the TransportParameter struct as defined in section 18 as:
> *struct {*
> *      TransportParameterId parameter;*
> *      opaque value<0..2^16-1>;*
> *} TransportParameter;*
> According to the encoding defined by the TLS spec, every key-value pair
> will be serialized as:
> TransportParameterID (2 byte), length (2 byte), value (length byte)
> where the length of the value is specified for each TransportParameterID.
> 
> We could switch to varint encoding, as follows:
> 
> 1. for the TransportParameterID: Since we’re only using the code points 0
> to 13, we could save one byte per ID by using a varint.
> 2. for the length: We would save one more byte, as long as the length of
> the value is less than 16 byte (which will be the case for all values
> except the preferred_address).
> 3. For numeric values: This would apply to the flow control offsets, the
> maximum stream IDs, the ack delay exponent , the maximum packet size and
> the max_ack_delay.
> 
> In addition to the byte-savings of 1. and 2., 3. has some more desirable
> properties:
>     1. It would allow us to encode the whole range of permitted values. For
> example, initial_max_data is a 62-bit value, but the current encoding just
> allows to send 4 bytes.
>     2. Depending on the value sent, this might or might not save a byte
> here and there.
>     3. We’d be consistent with the encoding we use everywhere else.