Bufferbloat was covered in a number of sessions at the Vancouver IETF last week.

The most important of these sessions is a great explanation of Kathie Nichols and Van Jacobson’s CoDel (“coddle”) algorithm given during Tuesday’s transport area meeting by Van. It is not to be missed by serious network engineers. It also touches on why we like fq_codel so much, though I plan to write much more extensively on this topic very soon. CoDel by itself is great, but in combination with SFQ (like) algorithms that segregate flows, the results are stunning; CoDel is the first AQM algorithm which can work across arbitrary number of queues/flows.

The Saturday before the IETF the IAB / IRTF Workshop on Congestion Control for Interactive Real-Time Communication took place. My position paper was my blog entry of several weeks back. In short, there is no single bullet, though with CoDel we finally have the final missing bullet for its complete solution. The other, equally important but non-technical bullets will be market pressure fix broken software/firmware/hardware all over the Internet: so exposing the bloat problem is vital. You cannot successfully engineer around bufferbloat, but you can detect it, and let users know when they are suffering to enable them to vote with their pocket books. In one of the later working groups, someone coined the term “net-sux” index, though I hope we can find something more marketable.

In the ICCRG (Internet Congestion Control Research Group) meeting, I covered research related topics including global topics, algorithmic questions, data acquisition and analysis needs, and needed tools for diagnosis.

Thursday included the RMCAT BOF. With the on-going deployment of large scale real time teleconferencing systems, congestion avoidance algorithms are becoming of pressing concern. TCP has integrated congestion avoidance algorithms, but RTP does not currently have equivalent mechanism. So long as RTP’s useage is low in the Internet, this is not a major issue; but classic 1980’s congestion collapse could occur should those rise to dominate Internet traffic. I was asked to cover AQM and Bufferbloat to help set context for the ensuing discussion. I covered the current status in brief and then added a bit of heresy. With a slight amount of forethought, we could arrange that someday real time media and AQM algorithms interact in novel ways. Detection (and preferably correct assignment of blame) is key to getting bufferbloat cleaned up.

In short, we’ve won the firstbattle for the hearts and minds of engineers who build the Internet and the tools are present to build the weapons to solve bufferbloat; but the campaign to fix the Internet will long and difficult.

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