Re: [p2pi] One more proposed definition of fairness...

[Daniel Weitzner <djweitzner at csail.mit.edu>]

Reflecting on the thread that followed Nick's original proposal  
(quoted below)....

I'd suggest that there are actually two kinds of fairness under  
discussion:

1. fairness between ISPs and their customers: you get the bandwidth  
and latency you pay for where those values are averaged over some  
stated period

2. fairness amongst network users: there are network mechanisms that  
guard against some traffic (perhaps generated by the hypothesized 5%)  
consistently degrading the traffic of others. That is, even though I  
may be receiving the promised average bandwidth as measured over a  
long period of time, the instantaneous performance is poor enough that  
I feel it.

 From the comments I've read I'll go out on a limb and suggest that no  
one really disagrees with the importance of achieving either notion.

I'll go further on a said limb and suggest that the IETF concentrate  
on mechanisms for enabling user-to-user fairness (#2) because it seems  
like a tractable engineering problem. User-to-user fairness is  
necessary but not sufficient to achieving user-to-ISP fairness (#1).  
It is the case that even with user-to-user fairness, ISPs may have to  
re-think their network provisioning in order to live up to their  
contractual and/or marketing promises made to users. That, however, is  
a business and regulatory problem. I do agree that it is important to  
have verifiable service metrics, but am not sure that this is the  
right place to sort those out.


On Jun 8, 2008, at 12:19 PM, Nicholas Weaver wrote:

> (Buried in a previous mail, but I'd like comments on this separately)
>
>
> How does the following sound as one possible ideal goal for user-
> fairness:
>
> "Mechanisms to enable the network to enforce traffic such that, in the
> presence of congestion, a user's congestion control response becomes
> equivalent to aggregating all traffic from that user into a single TCP
> stream."
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2pi mailing list
> p2pi at ietf.org
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-- 
Daniel J. Weitzner                          +1.617.253.8036
Director, MIT Decentralized Information Group
Principal Research Scientist, MIT CSAIL
W3C Technology & Society Policy Director
http://www.w3.org/People/Weitzner.html
blog: http://people.w3.org/~djweitzner/blog/





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