[e2e] Open the floodgate

[Mark Handley]

>yes, i think UCL should explain themselves -i've cc:d their member of the IAB:
>-)
>
> >>FYI, "TCP is so 80s it may be obsolete today."
> >>
> >>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/23720


[Disclaimer: My own opinion, not necessarily that of the rest of the IAB]

We all know that TCP's AIMD algorithm with the standard constants
cannot sustain very high delay-bandwidth products.  For the most part
today, the only people affected by this are the "big science"
community, because they're the only people who can justify
multi-gigabit pipes wide-area, used by only a handful of flows.  So
this isn't an issue today for almost everyone else.  But it will
become an issue before too long.

There are a lot of proposals on the table for how to improve on TCP in
these environments.  Probably the best quick summary (although not an
exhaustive list) is to look at the programme for PFLDnet 2003:

  http://datatag.web.cern.ch/datatag/pfldnet2003/program.html

Eventually we'll need consensus as to how to move forward, because not
all these proposals can co-exist gracefully.  I don't think we're
quite at the point yet where we need this consensus yet.

What the high-energy physicists do on their own private network links
is up to them - they have a real problem, and need solutions today.
These solutions may evolve into solutions used by the rest of us, but
they may turn out to not scale to the low-end, or to flakey wireless
links, or whatever.  The Internet is very heterogeneous, and
experiments need to take this into account.

As for TCP-BIC, time and peer-review will tell.  Poorly written press
articles don't exactly help make its case though.

Cheers,
	Mark