TCP "experiments"

On Jul 26, 2013, at 9:48 PM, Jon Crowcroft <[email protected]> wrote:

> while linux (pick your flavour) cubic isn't vanilla, neither is
> microsoft's compound tcp - the latter might have seen a bit more
> eval in the literature but the former has seen a lot more big iron
> deployment and doesn't appear to have broken the internet yet

How would we know? They're not instrumented. These are not experiments; they're deployments.

Even Schrödinger's cat eventually sees the light of day (as much as there is a cat in the first place).

> (although there are rumours and reports of corner case problems)
> but i dont think either of these are "non tcp" - they are variants
> on CC behaviour....

Which is a specified standard, which these mechanisms violate.

You do bring up a valid point about the subject line, so I've changed it for this thread going forward.

> also - the ability to do any deployment testing of a new tcp in
> anger _requires you_ to be wireline compatible with TCP because of
> the "non stadard" but ubiquitous NATs and other middleboxes

The environment doesn't support safe experiments, but that is not a valid excuse for unsafe ones.
...
> so the gold standard you quite reasonably want to hold people to, 
> to show their work doesn't do harm in the wild, 
> requires them to do "harm" by making
> their new variant TCP appear chameleon like, 
> vanilla TCP, so they can get results 

So they do harm to avoid doing harm?

They have failed because of their first step.

Joe