[R-C] BoF Scope of work

[Colin Perkins]

Agreed. The BoF isn't about solving the problem. It's about agreeing what the problem is, and defining a charter for a working group to solve that problem.

Colin


On 18 Jul 2012, at 11:07, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> My take on the BoF scope of work is fairly straightforward (I believe):
> 
> - We're preparing to deploy a new set of RTP applications on the Internet.
> 
> - There are Really Stupid Things that could happen if we don't do congestion control:
>  - Internet Congestion Collapse (transmitting lots of packets and getting no useful throughput)
>  - Random self-unfairness, where some channels in an app get good quality and other channels get
>    bad quality, independent of what the app would prefer
>  - Random unfairness to others, where you can't predict the behaviour of the call or of others' traffic
>    even when you know the conditions it's operating under
>  - I'm sure this list could go on for a while....
> 
> - Most previous deployments were (in practice) closed systems, and could do proprietary things. This one is intending to be open-standars-based, and depends on interoperability.
> 
> Thus, the focus of the WG that comes out of the BOF should be on:
> 
> - Getting something documented publicly that, if we all do it, prevents the most abysmally Stupid Things
> - Getting metrics defined that let us diagnose whether we're in trouble or not
> - Getting feedback from actual deployment that allows us to figure out whether we need to improve
> 
> Note that the word "optimal" doesn't occur in the above. We should stop being Really Bad before we worry about being Really Good.
> 
> (The fact that we're piggybacking deployment on the modern browser product cycle has certain advantages: Essentially, we can replace the entire installed base over a timescale of months. So the stuff that we learn from the first experience (which will certainly arrive ahead of an IETF-process-timescale standard!) can be fed back into the next generation of product fairly quickly.)
> 
> In my opinion, the BoF scope of work is to nail down the charter for the WG that allows us to accomplish this. The architectural issues, half-baked ideas and orthogonal approaches (like "change the way queueing is done in the Internet") will all have been discussed in Saturday's IAB workshop, and lots of possible ideas for work in other parts of the IETF may be coming from that.
> 
> This BoF needs to focus on the WG charter for documenting "interoperable ways of avoiding stupid behaviour".
> 
> My opinion.
> 
>                           Harald
> 
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-- 
Colin Perkins
http://csperkins.org/