On 04/03/2011 10:04 PM, George Bonser wrote:
Sigh... A major opportunity missed.
Unfortunately the bufferbloat problem isn't a laughing matter, though
I
do wish I had thought of this idea in time for my talk. I will
include
this joke as some levity about the mess we're in as I repeat the talk
going forward, and would tie in very nicely with one of the amusing
reasons that "RED in a different light" has never been published. I
really hate giving such bad news without some levity as it can be a
real
downer both for me and the audience.
Speaking of Van's paper, has that ever been located/revived? Is it
available beyond that one earlier draft that is available on the
Internet?
Van and Kathie managed to get a later version off a disk image and get
it out of Framemaker. Unfortunately, the paper was only half edited
when the second attempt at publication failed due to the circumstances I
blogged about at:
http://gettys.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/a-committee-is-a-life-form-with-six-or-more-legs-and-no-brain-lazarus-long/
Right now, they are concentrating on trying to get a consistent
description of the proposed RED Light algorithm captured correctly, so
we can code it up and try it. Then they will work on finishing up the
rest of the text for publication sometime this summer. What I have in
hand from Kathie at the moment is not internally consistent, though much
longer.
In the mean while, we've started work on various AQM and buffer
management systems, at www.bufferbloat.net. SFB (Stochastic Fair Blue)
went upstream into Linux to aid testing last month, and we have an
implementation of eBDP as well with which we are experimenting.
Wireless is much more of a challenge than the classic internet router
case. Please come help.
Note that the paper "Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks" by
Dischinger, et. al. indicates that a large fraction (in their 2 year old
sample, 30% or so) of broadband head ends are running without RED, and
should be doing so if at all possible; alternatives are years out by the
time they are tested and deployed, and operators running without it in
congested systems are inflicting pain on their customers.
- Jim
