Re: [tcpPrague] [tsvwg] ecn-l4s-id: Proposed Changed to Normative Classic ECN detection Text

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 11/1/2020 9:58 PM, Greg White wrote:
>
> On 11/1/2020 3:55 PM, Christian Huitema wrote:
>
>     On 11/1/2020 1:53 PM, De Schepper, Koen (Nokia - BE/Antwerp) wrote:
>
>         >>By the way, I do think that L4S makes too many hypotheses
>         about the CC. I wish the AQM was based on intrinsic
>         properties, such as "this flow is using more than its fair
>         share of bandwidth"
>
>         This last quote is exactly what the L4S marking is intended to
>         do: the smoothed marking probability over a longer time
>         interval (about 10 RTTs) indicates the fair target rate.
>         Assuming we agree on 15ms being the reference RTT, then the
>         average rate can be r=2/(p*0.015)=133/p packets per second. So
>         you can evaluate yourself if you use more or less than the
>         fair share. How you respond to this knowledge is up to your CC.
>
>     I think that part of the complexity in L4S AQM comes from trying
>     to achieve fair sharing of resource without actually implementing
>     fair queuing. You end up expecting that implementations apply a
>     formula and derive their packet sending rate from a smoothed
>     average of the packet marking rate. It may work well in controlled
>     environments, but I am afraid that very few implementations are
>     ever going to do that in practice.
>
>     Congestion Control algorithms are much more likely to treat packet
>     losses, markings, or delay increases as signals that they are
>     sending too fast, while considering their absence or lower
>     frequency as signal that they might be able to send faster.
>     Implementations also are likely to take into account the recent
>     history, for example monitoring the min RTT (LEDBAT, BBR), or
>     monitoring the recent available bandwidth (BBR). They also
>     typically filter signals, e.g., consider only one packet loss or
>     ECN mark per RTT (New Reno, Cubic, etc.). This is expected,
>     because we do see packet losses arriving in batches, and can
>     reasonably expect ECN marks to have the same behavior. But
>     implementations are inherently selfish, do not really trust the
>     signals from the network, and are very unlikely to end up applying
>     the formula that you suggest.
>
>     In any case, you have a scaling issue. Let's consider a 1.5Gbps
>     link, with 15 ms delay and 1500 bytes packets. The nominal sending
>     rate is 125,000 packets per second. The marking rate with your
>     formula shall be p = 2/(r*0.015), which is about 0.0008%. Over the
>     last 10 RTT, the connection will on average see 0.14 marks -- that
>     is, no mark over the last 10 RTT 86% of the time. This falls well
>     short of the requirement to provide frequent feedback!
>
> Sorry, bug in my spreadsheet. The marking rate is actually 0.1%, about
> 2 packets per RTT. Still not frequent enough for my taste, but much
> better than 0.0008%. Nevertheless, the inverse relation between
> marking rate and data rate is not great.
>
> [GW] But, this always works out to 2 marks per RTT or 2 marks per 15ms
> (whichever is slower), so in that sense it doesn’t depend on data rate
> at all.  The sender slows down if it sees more frequent marks than
> this, accelerates if it sees fewer marks than this, and stays put if
> it sees marking at this rate.
>
Yes, there is that. But even if the rate is large enough, the CC
implementations can only program such a constant if they have assurance
that every bottleneck that they encounter will use the same time
constant. I don't think we are ready to make such assumptions outside of
controlled experiments. I would expect a mix of L4S-AQM, CODEL and PIE
variants, classic ECN, etc. The host implementation has to be ready to
handle all that, and trying to use a time constant there is very
challenging.

>     If you give up the formula, you could end up with a significantly
>     simpler event based congestion control, in which applications slow
>     down if they see too many CE marks, accelerate if they only see a
>     very low marking rate, and stay put if they see an infrequent
>     marking rate. I can see applications doing that, resulting in a
>     fairly stable network and low delays. Of course, you will have to
>     do some form of fair share enforcement to catch violators, but I
>     am sure you can come up with something.
>
I still believe that this kind of "natural signaling" is easier to
handle than the formulaic behavior expected with L4S. It can easily
deliver the "low queing delay" goal of L4S. It cannot guarantee "fair
sharing of bandwidth", but my thesis is that such fair sharing requires
per-flow enforcement.

-- Christian Huitema