[e2e] traffic engineering considered harmful

[Jonathan M. Smith]

Hi Jon - I realize this comment is at least 3 nanoseconds out of date,
but this seems like a delayed response to my question of a week or so
ago about source routing as a more pure "e2e" design approach.

                                                                 best,
                                                                 -JMS

At 03:26 PM 6/12/2001 +0100, 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