Re: [tcpm] Discussion -- Pause/Resume mechanism on TCP ?

[Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

are you aware of the following research paper?

@inproceedings{DBLP
:conf/infocom/GoffMPG00,
  author    = {Tom Goff and
               James Moronski and
               Dhananjay S. Phatak and
               Vipul Gupta},
  title     = {Freeze-TCP: A True End-to-End TCP Enhancement Mechanism
               for Mobile Environments},
  booktitle = {INFOCOM},
  year      = {2000},
  pages     = {1537-1545},
  ee        = {http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2000/papers/501.pdf},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}

Lars

On 2010-4-20, at 12:32, Xiangsong Cui wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm thinking such a question, can we, or should we add a pause/resume mechanism on TCP?
> 
> Current TCP senders understand all packet losses as indications of congestion, but this is not always true, especially in the 
> scenarios where wireless link is part of the network. Compared with wire link, wireless link is less stable, with higher bit error 
> rate and more disconnection. And additionally, packet error and link disconnection can not be indicated by current TCP protocol and 
> extensions, do I miss anything?
> 
> 
> So I think maybe pause/resume mechanism is helpful to this situation. The outline of pause/resume mechanism is as follows:
> 
> * Pause/Resume indication may be transmitted by the receiver or the middle-box. Like ECN on TCP, middle-box may also send 
> Pause/Resume indication. The use cases may be (a) wireless host moves to a tunnel or a shadow where the radio coverage is lost, and 
> later returns to the radio coverage; (b) the router in the TCP path detects the next hop is invalid (by BFD or other mechanism), and 
> later detects the re-connection to the next hop; (c) the wireless host (i.e. the receiver) doesn't want to accept too many traffic. 
> A scenario for this use case is a user watches TCP video by wireless device, the user/device doesn't want buffer too many video 
> stream because maybe the user only watch a little begin part of the video, but the unwanted video would waste wireless bandwidth and 
> user's money. So the device does receiving-buffering-pausing-resuming, following the user's schedule.
> 
> * Pause/Resume indication is directional, that means the receiver of Pause should stop transmit traffic packets but the sender of 
> Pause may transmit traffic packets, unless the peer host also transmits a Pause indication.
> 
> * When the TCP sender receives the Pause indication, it should keep the cwind value, stop transmitting traffic packets, and if the 
> retransmission timer is running, the sender should also stop the timer. The TCP sender should accept received incoming TCP packet 
> (both traffic packet and control packet) as normal, that means the sender can adjust the receive window, mark the transmitted 
> packets as acknowledged, and so on.
> Another consideration is the Pause timer, the TCP sender should start the pause timer when it receives the Pause indication.
> 
> * After the TCP receiver transmits the Pause indication, it may accept the received traffic packets or discard the packets, but the 
> receiver should accept TCP control packets.
> 
> * When the TCP sender receives the Resume indication, it should begin to transmit traffic packets (if there are) as normal, if there 
> are transmitted packet(s) in the queue, it should also restart the retransmission timer...
> If the Pause timer is running, the TCP sender should kill the timer as soon as it receives the Resume indication.
> 
> * If the TCP sender doesn't receive the Resume indication before the Pause timer expires, it should close the TCP connection.
> 
> 
> The intention of Pause/Resume is to avoid the violent change on the TCP congestion window, does this idea make sense?
> If it builds interest, I am going to write a draft, anybody who like to co-work on this topic?
> 
> Thanks and best regards
> 
> Xiangsong 
> 
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