Responsiveness under Working Conditions
draft-cpaasch-ippm-responsiveness-01

Abstract

For many years, a lack of responsiveness, variously called lag, latency, or bufferbloat, has been recognized as an unfortunate, but common symptom in today's networks. Even after a decade of work on standardizing technical solutions, it remains a common problem for the end users. Everyone "knows" that it is "normal" for a video conference to have problems when somebody else at home is watching a 4K movie or uploading photos from their phone. However, there is no technical reason for this to be the case. In fact, various queue management solutions (fq_codel, cake, PIE) have solved the problem for tens of thousands of people. Our networks remain unresponsive, not from a lack of technical solutions, but rather a lack of awareness of the problem. We believe that creating a tool whose measurement matches people's every day experience will create the necessary awareness, and result in a demand for products that solve the problem. This document specifies the "RPM Test" for measuring responsiveness. It uses common protocols and mechanisms to measure user experience especially when the network is fully loaded ("responsiveness under working conditions".) The measurement is expressed as "Round-trips Per Minute" (RPM) and should be included with throughput (up and down) and idle latency as critical indicators of network quality.

Authors

Christoph Paasch
Randall Meyer
Stuart Cheshire
Omer Shapira

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)