Subject: I-D Action:draft-moncaster-congestion-exposure-problem-03.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:15:02 -0700 (PDT)

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : The Need for Congestion Exposure in the Internet
	Author(s)       : T. Moncaster, et al.
	Filename        : draft-moncaster-congestion-exposure-problem-03.txt
	Pages           : 22
	Date            : 2009-10-26

Today's Internet is a product of its history.  TCP is the main
transport protocol responsible for sharing out bandwidth and
preventing a recurrence of congestion collapse while packet drop is
the primary signal of congestion at bottlenecks.  Since packet drop
(and increased delay) impacts all their customers negatively, network
operators would like to be able to distinguish between overly
aggressive congestion control and a confluence of many low-bandwidth,
low-impact flows.  But they are unable to see the actual congestion
signal and thus, they have to implement bandwidth and/or usage limits
based on the only information they can see or measure (the contents
of the packet headers and the rate of the traffic).  Such measures
don't solve the packet-drop problems effectively and are leading to
calls for government regulation (which also won't solve the problem).

We propose congestion exposure as a possible solution.  This allows
packets to carry an accurate prediction of the congestion they expect
to cause downstream thus allowing it to be visible to ISPs and
network operators.  This memo sets out the motivations for congestion
exposure and introduces a strawman protocol designed to achieve
congestion exposure.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-moncaster-congestion-exposure-problem-03.txt

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ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

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