Re: [rtcweb] Pictures of congestion control on the Internet - which is more realistic?

[Michael Welzl <[e-mail]>]

On 23. apr. 2014, at 18:37, John Leslie wrote:

> Dave Taht <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> I'm not sure if we have a shared definition of "congestion".  Mine is
>> network delays exceeding that of what human factors research notes
>> as "perceptible" with about 20ms as the outer bound.
> 
>   I, OTOH, am quite sure we don't have a shared definition of congestion.
> 
>   My preferred definition is rate-of-arrival exceeding rate-of-forwarding.

FWIW, there's RFC 6077, which discusses definitions of congestion and congestion control in its introduction. It says:

" Congestion can be defined as a state or condition that occurs when
   network resources are overloaded, resulting in impairments for
   network users as objectively measured by the probability of loss
   and/or delay.  The overload results in the reduction of utility in
   networks that support both spatial and temporal multiplexing, but no
   reservation"

which is based on a presentation by Keshav in 2007, which, in turn, is based on the long and boring discussion about this definition that happened when ICCRG was born. Been there, done that, let's not repeat please.

Buuuuuut this seems off topic for the context here anyway... if you really want to discuss this definition, I suggest to take it to ICCRG. There, we will tell you to read the mailing list archives  :-)

Cheers,
Michael