Subject: Document Action: 'Updating TCP to support Rate-Limited Traffic' to Experimental RFC (draft-ietf-tcpm-newcwv-13.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2015 00:24:01 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Updating TCP to support Rate-Limited Traffic'
  (draft-ietf-tcpm-newcwv-13.txt) as Experimental RFC

This document is the product of the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions
Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Spencer Dawkins and Martin Stiemerling.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tcpm-newcwv/

Technical Summary

    This document describes an experimental proposal to allow TCP senders
    to restart data transfer quickly following an idle or less active period.
    This approach is expected to benefit applications that unable to send 
    at the maximum rate permitted by the congestion window for some reasons. 
    As a result, it aims to provide incentives for long-lived connections and 
    to remove ad-hoc tweaks in some applications that try to maintain a large
    cwnd for future data transmissions.
    The approach can be viewed as an updated version of RFC2861 and it obsoletes
    RFC2861.

Working Group Summary

    The draft has been discussed for around 4 years. There has been explicit support
    for the draft since the beginning. Main discussion points were some detailed 
    mechanisms in the logic that are related to estimating path capacity and 
    preserving congestion window size during applications are idle or less active. 
    The initial intended status of the draft was PS, but it has been changed to 
    Experimental as a result of the discussions. 
    Linux kernel has the codes which address the same issue. Their algorithms
    are slightly different from the document. There had been discussions between
    the linux kernel implementers and the document authors; however, they haven't
    reached the consensus to replace the existing kernel codes until more solid 
    evidences are found.
    The WG's conclusion is to publish the draft as an experimental and explore 
    its efficiency and feasibility of this approach. 

Document Quality

    The document has been reviewed and discussed by multiple participants in the WG.
    Some discussions points raised by reviewers are listed in Section 9.1.
    The patches to FreeBSD and Linux kernel have been made by the efforts from the 
    authors and other group. 

Personnel

    Yoshifumi Nishida is the Document Shepherd for this document.
    The Responsible Area Director is Martin Stiemerling