NWCRG @ IETF-100 (Singapore) ---------------------------- Thursday, November 16th, 2017 Afternoon session II 15:50-17:50 Room: Orchard Materials: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/100/proceedings#irtf Audio record: https://www.ietf.org/audio/ietf100/ietf100-orchard-20171116-1550.mp3 00- Welcome, administrative and general matters, information for new participants 01- Interim meeting: quick feedbacks (Chairs) Please note that nwcrg wiki is available at URL: https://trac.ietf.org/trac/irtf/wiki/nwcrg (be careful of bad pointers in datatracker/irtf web pages... To be fixed). New in nwcrg: name + charter + milestones. See: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/nwcrg/charter/ Quick feedback on Sept. 19th Interim meeting. Allison Mankin (IRTF): it's important to focus on hard problems rather than use-cases. The same document that tries to solve problems may apply to several use-cases. Publishing RFCs is expensive so use them well. Chairs: Agreed. PART I: Coding aspects ====================== 02- NC for new members and existing network codes/protocols (Chairs) Quick introduction to what nwcrg is about as well as non-goals. Dave Oran (Network Systems Research & Design): Is it the same as "erasure codes"? The term "erasure" is not mentioned. Vincent: Sure, loss and erasure are synonymous. 03- Generic, common NC API (Vincent Roca) draft-roca-nwcrg-generic-fec-api-00 API with the core NC codec. It will not consider protocol-level functionalities (CC, header creation/processing, SACK if any, etc.) that are essential but out of scope of this API. This is the first step towards a free, open-source codec. BTW, if anybody knows candidate C/C++ codecs, please tell us. Dave: What if the codec is in FPGA? In that case bits may have to remain in the gates. Vincent: I don't have any experience but that's a very good point. Ian Swett: For next step it would be useful to try several of these. We used to have a stupidly difficult to use API [VR: for another component] in QUIC v1 until people came with the right things to do. Vincent: Sure. All I-D co-authors have practical experience developing software codecs. This is key to success. Dave: It would be very good to have a null codec to measure separately the effects of the API on performance. Vincent: Sure. Typically, data copies is known to cost a lot. PART II: Use-cases where NC could be beneficial =============================================== NC for satellite communications ------------------------------- 04- "Network coding and satellites" (Nicolas Kuhn) draft-kuhn-nwcrg-network-coding-satellites-01 Goal is to try to identify what is currently deployed and challenges of using NC with satellites. An issue with satellite industry is the lack of open standards. For the moment, four research axes are identified. Please contribute. Marie-José: I could help. What are the limits of the satellite network? In my experience it's important since there can be losses in many different places, and probably not in the satellite link itself. Nicolas: Yes, the architecture is complex and loss may happen in the gateway. We also want to consider mobile situations that will cause physical layer losses. (?) Huawei: What are the links with NFVRG? Nicolas: We want to virtualize some of these functions/components. Simon Pietro Romano (Univ. of Napoli): Thank you, that's a very useful document. Also, we're co-authoring an I-D with Angeles Vazquez-Castro on the NFVRG/NC topic. There's also a EU project that uses NC for content delivery networks using hybrid networks (satellite + terrestrial) and we'd be glad to share information. Nicolas: We're very interested by the project as we need some caching. Concerning NFVGR, we essentially want to focus on how to deploy that in satellite networks today. Dean Bogdanovic (Volta Networks): Are you aware of Delay Disruptive Network WG? They are working on data models to define communications. NC for ICN/CCN -------------- 05- "NC and ICN/CCN research challenges" (Hitoshi Asaeda/Kazuhisha Matsuzono, potentially with Cedric Westphal) Same presentation as the one made during ICNRG meeting. This document describes requirements and research challenges for NC and CCN/NDN. Dave: You could statically decide that the coding vector is from the producer. Then only one possible coding vector for all possible consumers. If it's from the content requestor, then the coded packets cannot be produced in advance and there's some latency. I would decide as a separate design question. Allison: How to proceed and decide what to do in NWCRG and what to do in the ICNRG? Should the I-D be split? Marie-Jose: Coding aspects should be here while application aspects should be in ICNRG. Dave: (as ICNRG co-chair): The longer we can wait until we split, the better, because we need cross-RG discussions. Chairs: We agree. NC and QUIC ----------- 06- "FEC codes and QUIC" (Ian Swett) More details on how NC could be done within QUIC, the various options. See slides for implementation pointers for experimental work. Dave: What about multipath? Given that QUIC does not do multipath today. Ian: People want to experiment first with multipath. Dave: The point is that NC gets a lot of value if you do multipath, otherwise there will be less incentive. Angeles Vazquez-Castro (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona): Fully agree. NC is a network function and we need to think in advance about all the objectives. Nicolas: Indeed there's an interaction between NC and Congestion Control. In case of multipath, there will be impacts but in a totally different way than in unicast. Dave: Let me summarize: multipath creates main changes on QUIC congestion control, independently from NC. In that case we'll need multipath congestion control. And people will see more value for this work if it considers multipath. Ian: Do you know previous works on this domain? Angeles: There's pre-work on multipath TCP that can help. PART III: Research Project Updates ================================== 07- "On the joint use of TCP and network coding" (Emmanuel Lochin) (10') This talk is about signaling to TCP that a loss happened although it has been recovered thanks to NC at the receiver. Re-using ECN marking to that purpose avoids having to do any modification to TCP, using only existing mechanisms. (?): Do you intend to issue an IPR Disclosure? Emmanuel: Yes, it will be done. Vincent: In figures, does the Y-axis represent the goodput or throughput? Emmanuel: Only the throughput is presented. 08- "NC and Congestion Control: problem statement, potential approaches, status" Marie-Jose, on behalf of William Sears/Brandon Williams. This talk is about interactions between NC and congestion control, and experience with packet losses at Akamai. This topic is recognized as a major topic for the group. A draft is neededed (London probably). Collaborations are welcome. Dave: in a delay based CC scheme, accuracy in measuring delay is essential. Do you believe the computation cost of reconstructing packets may impact the delay estimation? Marie-Jose: No. Cost in reconstructing packets is very low, especially with systematic codes. Nicolas: BBR is more a rate based protocol even if rate is function of delay. Marie-Jose: Agree. But non-loss based congestion control is something we'd like to look at. Ian: FEC should not have connections with congestion control, it's just for faster loss recovery. Marie-Jose: In the past people we using NC supported UDP tunnels and were very happy of the results, ignoring the effects on other TCP flows. We need to show our solutions does not harm the Internet. Emmanuel: Fully agree. Michael Welzl (Univ. Oslo): One of the benefits of ECN is that you can almost be loss-free. You could recover a loss with NC but then signal that a loss happened and do the same as ECN. Marie-Jose: Yes, this is the idea of signaling something. This is why it's important to have a document that catches all these ideas, something we can showed to somebody who believes that coding necessarily kills the network. Dave: Let's not go over the 20 years of mistakes: we need to build something that distinguishes losses caused by congestion and other types of losses. We may have an opportunity with QUIC congestion control to do that. Marie-Jose: Sure. This is why it's important for the group to consider that problem. 09- "Network coding and Multihop Wireless Networks" (Cedric Adjih) This talk discusses a NC based solution with re-encoding within a multihop wireless network. Emmanuel: How do you select the repeaters? Does it follow a stochastic process? Cedric: Yes. Every node repeats coded packets but waits for a random time that depends on the state. If there are lots of losses, more coded packets are sent. Vincent: How is your FEC codec specific to your use-case? Could we reuse it for the open-source codec? Cedric: I don't think it's specific. Vincent: What's the future of this work? Cedric: It's a really preliminary version. Next step is to clean up and release entire protocol. Not immediately. Chairs: Thanks everybody for this successful meeting!