[Tsvwg] Re: terminology issues in draft-floyd-tsvwg-besteffort - simple pair-wise relationships

[Sally Floyd <[e-mail]>]

> 5/ Economic infrastructure: Simple pair-wise relationships (in our 
> simplest proposal)
>
> Please don't imply we're making economic infrastructure more complex. 
> All network layer relationships would still be between directly 
> connected neighbours (pairwise).
>
> Currently many border contracts between privately connected ISPs or 
> between ISPs and a peering exchange include an element of usage 
> charging (as well as interface capacity pricing). Whether based on 
> volume, on some notion of peak demand, or on a hybrid. We propose 
> adding a metric (congestion volume) that is only slightly less simple 
> than monthly byte-volume.
>
> However, congestion volume is much more effective, as it can be used 
> to make networks precisely accountable for the costs they cause in 
> other networks (unlike a volume metric, which depresses usage even 
> when the capacity is there for it).
>
> So most of the inter-domain contracts that currently include an 
> element of usage might switch to using congestion volume. And those 
> that don't include any form of usage measurements in their contracts 
> might stick that way. That doesn't make any contracts any more 
> complex.

Our draft says the following:

    "The difficulties of deployment for end-to-end intserv or diffserv
    mechanisms are well-known, having in part to do with the difficulties
    of deployment for the economic infrastructure that would be needed
    [B03].  It seems likely that cost-based pricing based on re-ECN could
    also have a difficult deployment path, involving the deployment of
    ECN-marking at routers, policers at both ends of a connection, and a
    complex set of economic relationships [B07]."

I would be happy to clarify it that the set of economic relationships
required for "cost-based pricing based on re-ECN" would be pairwise,
with a metric for congestion volume.

(Note that this sentence is not about all possible forms of re-ECN,
but about "cost-based pricing based on re-ECN".  Our draft is not
about re-ECN - it is simply in support of "simple best-effort
traffic", and in support of flow-based fairness for simple best-effort
traffic.)

- Sally
http://www.icir.org/floyd/