Technical Summary
This document discusses the metrics to be considered in an
evaluation of new or modified congestion control mechanisms for the
Internet. These include metrics for the evaluation of new transport
protocols, of proposed modifications to TCP, of application-level
congestion control, and of Active Queue Management (AQM)
mechanisms in the router.
Working Group Summary
This document is a product of the Transport Modeling Research Group
(TMRG), and has received detailed feedback from many members of the
Research Group (RG). As the document tries to make clear, there is
not necessarily a consensus within the research community (or the
IETF community, the vendor community, the operations community, or
any other community) about the metrics that congestion control
mechanisms should be designed to optimize, in terms of tradeoffs
between throughput and delay, fairness between competing flows, and
the like. However, we believe that there is a clear consensus that
congestion control mechanisms should be evaluated in terms of
tradeoffs between a range of metrics, rather than in terms of
optimizing for a single metric.
Protocol Quality
Lars Eggert (lars.eggert@nokia.com) has reviewed this document
for the IESG. It is planned that these metrics play a role in the
evaluation of new congestion control schemes in the IRTF's ICCRG
research group and related IETF working groups, such as TCPM.
RFC Editor Note
Section 2.2.1., paragraph 2:
> bandwith-delay product changes are expected to become
s/bandwith-delay/bandwidth-delay/
IESG Note
Based on the Working Group Summary, the IESG believes that the
second variant suggested in Appendix A of draft-irtf-rfcs-0
is appropriate for this document:
"This document in not an IETF Internet Standard. It represents
the individual opinion(s) of one or more members of the TMRG
Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force. It may be
considered for standardization by the IETF or adoption as a
IRTF Research Group consensus document in the future."