Re: [Taps] I-D Action: draft-ietf-taps-transports-07.txt

[Brian Trammell <[e-mail]>]

hi Karen,

Thanks for the comments and review! Commentcomments inline, anything not remarked on is accepted into -08 as-is.

> On 28 Oct 2015, at 13:16, Karen Elisabeth Egede Nielsen <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> HI,
> 
> Please accept the following comments.
> Use them as/if you see fit.
> (Given my wretched, non-twistable, arms you are allowed not to take them
> too seriously)
> 
> Section 3.1.1:
> 
> 6'th paragraph:
> 
> " In addition, a congestion control
>   mechanism may react to changes in delay as an early indication for
>   congestion."
> 
> I think one will need to give a reference to this as it is not covered by
> the reference to RFC5681.
> Possibly this statement is better given in the context of the next
> paragraph referring to extensions.
> 
> [I am aware that I have given this comment before. The reason that this
> continues to be an issue for me is that
> delay based CC alg's also are applicable to, e.g., SCTP (and have been
> applied there, though I don't know much
> about real deployment of them for SCTP).
> I am not sure if the solution to this is to have a special common section
> about congestion control algorithms - referring possibly
> to that these special CC als mostly are in deployment for TCP].

It does seem to me that CC algorithms as deployed in the Internet are somewhat orthogonal to the mechanics of the underyling transport protocol, so this is probably not a bad idea... I'll have a look at how this could be easily refactored out of the document, probably into a new section 4 (before the present section 4)...

> 9'th paragraph:
> 
> Reference to push flag:
> 
> The sentence:
> 
> "TCP provides a push and a urgent function to enable data to be
>   directly accessed by the receiver without having to wait for in-order
>   delivery of the data."
> 
> Should be revised I think. It is not very clear what the push flag
> contribute with in this sentence. The PUSH flag helps to release a "tail"
> packet from a  TSO/GRO function/temporary packet buffering function. This
> feature of TCP might be significantly enough to describe the
> PUSH flag function as an implicit and internal protocol implementation
> optimization making TCP "push" tails through
> intermediate buffering functions. But the PUSH function is not really a
> "function" that TCP stacks provide to the ULP today
> (even if this is described as an optional possibility in RFC1122) - Or is
> it ?

I've never seen it treated as one; to my knowledge inconsistent treatment has led to PSH being largely ignored/ignorable, but there are probably people with more thorough knowledge on this list...

> The urgent flag is not recommended ... so does it belong here ?

It does provide a (not very functional) out of order delivery mechanism, though its deprecation should be referenced here here. Will do so in -08.

> Section 4.1:

Section 4.1 has been removed, in the interests of getting the document out the door. The hierarchical list in Section 4 replaces it.

> I wonder if SCTP Reliability could be Full/Partial/None

This is captured in the present (GitHub) revision of the list.

> I wonder if unordered delivery should be added as a row.

Unordered delivery is an entry in the list.

> I am not sure if ECN for SCTP should be marked as TBD. Applicability of
> RFC3168 to SCTP is described in RFC4960.

We don't have a line item for ECN in the list yet, perhaps we should.

> I personally don’t know of any deployment of this.


By "no deployment" you mean "no implementation" or "it's not turned on"?

Thanks again, cheers,

Brian