[e2e] traffic engineering considered harmful

[Manish Karir]

definately a very e2e idea, but misses one crucial fact, that 
the network providers are different from the consumers(the ends).
the network providers can never be convinced to trust the ends to 
do the right thing(did'nt somebody on this list bring up the issue of
trust earlier...??) think about it...if you spend millions building 
out your network, would you let somebody else control it??

manish karir


On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Jon Crowcroft wrote:

> 
> so here's a new topic
> 
> Why I think traffic engineering is a Bad Thing
> 	by jon crowcroft
> 
> I think traffic engineering is a Bad Thing
> because it is only a good thing for ISPs. 
> traffic engineering is about maximising utilsiation of 
> your resources - whether its fiddling with MPLS FEC or
> hacking the metrics in OSPF, what you're trying to do is post hoc
> rationalisation.
> 
> what would be better? what would be better would be to give the users
> a choice - if loose source routing (or strict, or scalelble
> multihoming, or IPv6 GSE) worked well, then users would choose the
> best path for their traffic. if a user who sees a poor packet loss
> (or ECN marking) rate on path a can try a different path, then a market 
> in alternate paths would develope - this would obviate the need for
> traffic engineering, and would make it an end2end selection (hence why
> i am posting this here)
> 
> What's hard about this? routers. why is it hard. well, only coz we
> havnt thought about optimising them for it - fact is it oughta be easy
> coz they have LESS decision to make if we do this, since we take the
> decision out of their silicon paws and puit it into the C-shape hands
> of end system software....
> 
> thats what i think....but only for the next 3 nanoseconds...
> 
> chrz
> 
> 
> jon 
>