Re: [tcpPrague] [tcpm] [aqm] L4S status update

[Jonathan Morton <[e-mail]>]

> On 30 Nov, 2016, at 23:56, John Leslie <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Better would be to identify latency-sensitive flows by a specific signal,
> and continue to deliver a "fair share" of packets "immediately" and marked
> to show the congestion.

Cake does that, too.  It looks at Diffserv markings and sorts them into categories, each having a separate set of queues.  It even takes care to avoid both obvious incentives for using inappropriate DSCPs, and hard bandwidth caps where there is spare bandwidth to use - properties that few other Diffserv implementations achieve simultaneously.

All of the presets (except for a legacy “precedence” mode) recognise at least CS1 (for background traffic, which in theory BitTorrent should be using), TOS4 (often used by SSH), CS6 (for NTP), and VA/EF (for voice traffic) as distinct from best-effort traffic, and apply appropriate parameters.

A similar system can be built using multiple fq_codel instances and a classifier, and such a construction has been available as part of OpenWRT for some time.

In practice, not very much traffic carries an appropriate Diffserv code.  We’ve found the “sparse = latency sensitive” heuristic to be a good one in practice, both in Cake and in fq_codel.

 - Jonathan Morton