Subject: Re: [Tsvwg] Input for draft-paxson-tcp-rto-00.txt

From: Mark Allman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 1999 10:35:36 -0500

I have been watching this thread with some obvious interest.  My
high-oder bit goes something like this...  

First, we have studies that suggest a 1 second minimum RTO is
conservative.  There are suggestions floating around (including
those presented by Reiner) that very well may be better than using a
1 second minimum.  I don't care to dispute Reiner's assertion that
his ideas are superior.  However, I'd rather see a bunch of evidence
that the scheme is better before we decide to change away from
something that is known to be nicely conservative in favor of a
scheme that is more aggressive.

I would hope those working on "better" RTO estimators will
thoroughly investigate the new estimators.  And, that these
investigations will feed into IETF standards track documents at some
future point (if the algorithms turn out to be appropriate).
However, I see no reason to block this document on the possibility
of getting evidence of a new and better RTO estimator at some point
in the future.

allman

---

From: Reiner Ludwig <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 1999 18:07:35 +0100

>of getting evidence of a new and better RTO estimator at some point

This is not my intention. By now, I understand that the purpose of the I-D 
is to simply document the "de facto". This was not clear to me in the 
beginning. I now agree that it is a good idea to have this I-D become a 
proposed standard, and I appreciate your, Vern's and the other involved 
people's efforts.

Furthermore, I certainly agree that any alternative for estimating the RTO 
will need to be *very* thoroughly verified before someone even thinks about 
feeding it into the IETF. When I started this thread (posting the pointer 
to our paper), I wanted to make people aware of some problems we found with 
the current "de facto" RTO. My intention was *not* to promote a new RTO 
that at this point has *not* been thoroughly verified.

In my past mails, I'm merely questioning what the "de facto" for the 
RTO-MIN really is.

///Reiner