Skip to main content

Minutes IETF101: nwcrg
minutes-101-nwcrg-00

Meeting Minutes Coding for efficient NetWork Communications Research Group (nwcrg) RG
Date and time 2018-03-22 13:30
Title Minutes IETF101: nwcrg
State Active
Other versions plain text
Last updated 2018-03-28

minutes-101-nwcrg-00
---------------------------------
NWCRG @ IETF-101 (London) minutes
---------------------------------
Thursday, March 22nd, 2018
Afternoon session I 13:30-15:30

More information: https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/nwcrg/

Meetecho archive:
https://play.conf.meetecho.com/Playout/?session=IETF101-NWCRG-20180322-1330
              or:
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GXNQjyNISw&t=0s&list=PLC86T-6ZTP5j_HaBNdfPbgxGIp22cnaWS&index=136
Meeting material: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/materials/#nwcrg
IETF 102 Agenda and material:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/agenda.html#2018-03-22-083000

Minutes taker: Nicolas Kuhn (thanks!)

00- Welcome, administrative and general matters, information for new
participants (Chairs) (10')

See chair slides.
In particular:
- we are planning to meet at IETF 102, Montreal, July 14
- we are planning to have an interim meeting. The tentative date is Tuesday
Sept. 25th, 2018. It will be in Boston because there's a critical NC mass in
the area. Remote participation will be possible.

PART I: NC building blocks
==========================

01- "Tetrys, an On-the-Fly Network Coding protocol" (Jonathan Detchart) (10+5')
        draft-detchart-nwcrg-tetrys-04

The goal of the presentation is not on the protocol itself but rather the
document and how to go forward.

Dave Oran: Clarification. What are the overlaps between this and the TSVWG
FECFRAME and RLC work? Jonathan Detchart: We have common information but this
is a different format. Dave: Which approach to use for what field of
applicability? Guidance is needed. Marie-Jose Montpetit (from the floor) :
we've had discussions with other persons involved in other drafts. We want to
go for open building blocks that can be used independently. Dave: We don't have
any a main document that presents which solution is appropriate for a given
use-case. Who decides when to call what API? Guidance is needed to help the
community use the intended building blocks. We can do some experimentations.
Vincent Roca (from the floor and as author of the FECFRAME/RLC documents): Good
point. There are overlaps between FECFRAME and Tetrys as well as work on RLNC
(next presentation). We wanted to put this question explicitly on the table
after next presentation. Marie-Jose: we intend to start discussions on the list
on how to address this point. Muriel Médard: Is recoding envisioned in the
draft? Jonathan: it is basically end-to-end without recoding, even if we once
considered this possibility.

02- "Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC)-Based Symbol Representation" (Janus
Heide) (10+5')
        draft-heide-nwcrg-rlnc-00

Vincent : Thank you for this initiative. A document that describes RLNC is on
our milestones. It is also important as it includes a header format discussion.
I have technical comments that can be taken offline. Between FECFRAME, RLNC and
TETRYS, we see the potential to have common and reusable headers. I propose to
split this I-D into a document that only focusses on RLNC and a separate
document specifically on header formats. For this second document, I would
suggest that the authors of the different proposals collaborate.This will of
course be discussed on the list. Jonathan: Do you want several documents with
the different header formats? Vincent: We need one document but not necessarily
a single header format. We do not have the answer today, this is still an open
question. Muriel: To make sure: do you want a general format document? Vincent:
One document that defines a header building block. Dave: Goal is good, but if
we have n formats and m protocols, at the end we have an n * m problems. We
have seen this in the IETF: too many parallel efforts may result in big
problems. We may constrain the number of formats or number of protocols. Dave:
What in this document is specific to RLNC? Muriel: Nothing in the document is
specific to RLNC in terms of format, RLNC is just a motivating example. There
have been proposals on doing RLNC without conveying the coefficient since there
are other ways of recovering them.

Vincent: Jonathan, can you produce a new version of the document that focusses
on a generic protocol with building blocks that are moved somewhere else
whenever possible? Jonathan: Yes. We could imagine a generic format where
re-encoding would only be an option, for instance with a field that indicates
that coding coefficients are inserted. Muriel: For re-encoding, you may not
need to convey the coefficients, it's not a sine qua non condition.

Vincent: if you believe an IPR disclosure should be made for this document,
then do that rapidly (BCP 79). Gianmarco Tasca (CodeOn): A quick correction on
the wording. IPR disclosure "must be made as soon as reasonably possible" (BCP
79). The IP is shared between 8 universities and we are working on the IPR
disclosure, discussing the best licensing strategy and approach. Vincent: But
you confirm that there will be an IPR disclosure on this document? Gianmarco:
Yes.

03- "Generic, common NC API" (Vincent Roca) (10+5')
        draft-roca-nwcrg-generic-fec-api-01

Q1: Should the API be compatible with both block codes and sliding window codes?

Dave: Can't you do a block code with a sliding window API?
Vincent: We can do it - a block code is a specific sliding window code. There
are however practical differences. Muriel: I want to echo Dave's point. There
is a large literature bringing together block code and sliding window. The
blocks code may overlap. Vincent: Yes, but when you go into the details, it is
not easy to have an API that let you do both without being too complicated.
Muriel: We want it to be practical.

Q2: Should the ADU to source symbols mapping be done by the codec?

Dave: By "outside of the codec", do you mean outside the API or inside the API?
Vincent: The codec will only consider symbols : the mapping will be done before.
Dave: You have to demonstrate that you don't get multiple data copies when you
do that.

Q3: Should the packet headers be managed by the codec?

Q4: Should timing considerations be managed by the codec?

Q5: What about hardware constraints?

Dave: High level comment: you do not want to structure the API so that if you
have a split software (e.g., for application and protocol)/hardware (e.g., FPGA
for coding operations) implementation, you don't have to pass every symbol
independently across the software/hardware boundary, because you'll blow the
latency gain out. If uncoded and coded symbols are sent back and forth
individually across the hardware and software boundary, it won't work very
well. So you have to consider an API in which there's inherent ability to do
batching, so that the interactions are made over a reasonably large number of
input and output symbols.

Emmanuel Lochin: Are you sure that we do not need to have time-stamping in the
codec? Vincent: For the moment, this is our opinion. Emmanuel: E.g., with TCP
you may need to estimate end-to-end delay. Vincent: This would be done in the
application, not the codec. If you have strong opinions on why we should
consider it, let us know. Muriel: Discussion on hardware implementation.
Marie-Jose: Go to the list for further comments/inputs.

04- "Network Coding and Congestion Control" (Nicolas Kuhn) (5')

Quick status on the document, and question on what to do next, if there is
sufficient energy and material in the group to go further.

Ian Swett: It's interesting but you have to precise the scope of the document.
There are things like coding for satellites that may be unaware of TCP and QUIC
but might still interact with congestion control that's running end-to-end.
There's also the question of end-to-end versus re-encoding. Doing both is
useful but is a bigger task. Vincent: If this document could explain we can do
things in an intelligent way so that coding does not break other things, that
would be valuable. Dave: There's additional complexity with coding schemes that
adapt to the type of error they have seen, and if you're not careful you can
easily create more congestion. There's not enough expertise in a classic
congestion control transport group nor in a coding group like you. It's a
really good research problem and we need expertise from both sides. I like
adding dynamic coding here because it's gonna hit us. I've seen the draft on
using ECN, it's very nice but it's only part of the solution. Spencer Dawkins:
(as AD responsible of the QUIC WG) you may want to speak about that with QUIC
chairs to make sure to involve the right people from that side. (as IRSG
member) Between IETF and IRTF we'll find a place to have this discussion.
Muriel: this is a great idea.

PART II: Use-cases for NC
=========================

05- "Coding for QUIC" (Ian Swett) (10+5')
        draft-swett-nwcrg-coding-for-quic-00 (to be updated)

Dave: Question on encoding on top or below encryption: do you have to reorder
before you decrypt? Ian: No you do not.

Dave: things may work out better if we were timing it with what is happening in
multi-path discussion. This is a good moment to move forward. Lars (with QUIC
chair hat): if you want to do anything on QUIC this year, it is too late. We
are trying to have a single path HTTP QUIC version for the moment. The WG will
not have official multi-path activities before the November dead-line. Cedric
Thienot (Expway): I come from a 3GPP world where we use Raptor code for RTP. In
that context, having a different stream for coded data makes sense, in
particular for backward compatibility.

06- "Progress on the network coding and satellites draft" (Nicolas Kuhn) (10+5')
        draft-kuhn-nwcrg-network-coding-satellites-02

Muriel: I like the taxonomy of the different problems. We have pointers on
activity made here that we can share to the group.

07- "NC and ICN/CCN research challenges" (Kazuhisha Matsuzono) (10+5')
        draft-matsuzono-nwcrg-nwc-ccn-reqs-01

NB: presentation made both in NWCRG and ICNRG.

Vincent: Is the security and privacy discussion to add related to coding or to
ICN in general, which would be a huge task? Kazuhisha: Specific to coding.
Muriel: It's interesting to look at convolutional coding per se, indeed. I'd be
happy to participate. Vincent: Last we said it was great to have a shared
activity between NWCRG and ICNRG. Does it work? Dave (with ICNRG chair): It's
working fine.

08- "Softwarisation and Virtualisation of Network Coding Function and link
between NWCRG-NFVRG"
        (Ángeles Vázquez-Castro) (10+5')

Dave: In the section on flow engineering, I was expecting a discussion on
closed versus open loop control. Most of these naive chaining functions are
open-loop control. With NFV you may not need loop control, but it is needed for
network control. Angeles: At the moment we define which block we want to look
into. How to do that will come after and this is a very good input.