UDP vs. TCP distribution [was: Re: [e2e] Can feedback be generated...]

[Damon Wischik]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Sean Doran wrote:
> It's not going to be cheaper to have an empty network than to have one
> with a bottleneck here and there.  It's also not like there are that
> many applications that are so inelastic that latency is worth paying
> real extra $ to remove, when volume-over-time figures are "good enough"
> to make the per-available-mbps or 95th-percentile-utilization charges
> worth it
> ...

Might it be that by reducing latency one can improve the performance even
of elastic traffic? TCP, for example, controls its rate using a feedback
loop: the lower the latency, the tighter the control loop. There are
results to suggest that tighter control loops will improve the stability
of the network; this could be worth paying for.

For references, see 
  http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~frank/int/
particularly
"Stability of distributed congestion control with heterogeneous feedback
  delays" (L.Massoulie)
"End-to-end congestion control for the Internet: delays and stability"
  (R.Johari and D.Tan.)

Damon Wischik.