Subject: Protocol Action: 'Requirements for Time-Based Loss Detection' to Best Current Practice (draft-ietf-tcpm-rto-consider-17.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2020 10:42:01 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Requirements for Time-Based Loss Detection'
  (draft-ietf-tcpm-rto-consider-17.txt) as Best Current Practice

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

The IESG contact persons are Martin Duke and Magnus Westerlund.

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

Technical Summary

This document provides high-level guidance to design last resort time-based
loss detection schemes for general use on the Internet, which can be applied
to not only TCP, but also other transport protocols and applications that
need their own loss detection mechanisms. This Best Current Practice
document describes generic principles to update existing loss detection
algorithms or to develop new ones, which may be especially useful to non-
specialist implementers of applications running directly over UDP or DTLS,
which therefore require custom loss detection.

Working Group Summary

This draft has been around for 10 years, and is in tcpm for historical reasons.
It has received significant review from both tsvwg and iccrg, where relevant
expertise is present. There was also a WGLC in tsvwg.

Document Quality

This is not a protocol, but a series of design considerations. Standardized loss
detection algorithms in TCP, SCTP, and QUIC are compliant with the
requirements here and widely implemented. The described principles are
uncontroversial in the transport community, and most WG description was
focused on correct wording of those principles.

Ethan Blanton, Sally Floyd, Jana Iyengar, Shawn Ostermann, and Vern Paxson
provided particularly important contributions over the years.

Personnel

Yoshifumi Nishida is the document shepherd. Martin Duke is responsible Area
Director. There are no IANA actions.