[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[Vadim Antonov]

On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Lynne Jolitz wrote:

> My comments were in the context of harnessing e2e expertise to make sure
> that experimental networking changes made in releases considered
> carefully congestion and fairness. If that cannot be achieved, then the
> marketplace will prevail, with unpredictable consequences to network
> performance and reliability.

I guess in the end the network will be designed properly - i.e. resistant
to any kind of behavior from the end hosts (including malicious). It is
not that hard to achieve.  The best-effort delivery with no fairness
enforcement by the network itself is asking for trouble, and I'm suprised 
that it still persists.

If the network is enforcing fairness, there is nothing a misbehaving host
(or millions of misbehaving hosts) could do to degrade performance as seen
by other users (except as a part of coordinated DDoS attack on a 
specific target).

How hard it is to turn the Fair Queueing knob to "on" on the gateways?

The mass deployment of supposedly poorly behaving stacks is either a
problem (in which case ISPs and equipment vendors will do the homework
needed to protect their networks - or leave the ground to smarter
competitors), or a non-issue (in which case nothing changes).  In both
cases, there's no problem in the long term.  With "long" is closer to days
than years.

So, why exactly should we care?

--vadim