# Measurement-Driven Protocol Engineering The thesis: we have learned a whole lot over the past three decades about how to and how not to measure the Internet. In addition to providing insight about the network's structure, these also generate data that can be used to determine the relative prevalance of behaviors in the network, in order either to evaluate the applicability/ deployability/otherwise-good-ideaness of a protocol. On the other hand, lots of our protocols are designed on a basis of intuition, good engineering practice, and anecdata. So how can we apply measurement to remedy this situation, and what kinds of measurements can we lean on? In TSV alone examples of design-by-anecdata abound: MPTCP spent a great deal of design effort trying to work around both anecdotally-observed as well as predicted middlebox interference; TCPM has had similar discussions about multiple proposals to extend options space each built on an implicit model of this interference; the majority of the technical TCPINC traffic of late hinges on how to handle TCP simultaneous open (which, it turns out, is hard when your crypto protocol needs to know who shot first), with estimates of how often TCP simultaneous open is actually used ranging from "all the time" to "never". The How Ossified is the Protocol Stack? (HOPS) proposed RG is looking to tackle this problem with specific respect to the deployability of new transport protocols -- what is the prevalence of specific middlebox (mis-)behaviors and impairments to path transparency, which turns into the following questions: what does it make sense to build workarounds for at runtime (fall back to something-over-TCP when you're inside an enterprise firewall on early 21st century default rules and blocks something-over-UDP), what does it make sense to simply ignore and let fail (ECN causes your router to reboot, which did indeed happen fifteen years ago but doesn't much anymore because security), and what does it not even make sense to try (protocols without ports behind a NAPT box). In short, we want data to inform our decisions about how to evolve the protocol stack. The question I hope to pose in the plenary is: is this a principle beyond HOPS? are there other areas in which measurement can be used more effectively to make protocol engineering decisions? # Proposed outline From the current idea of the plenary schedule we have 30 + 15 minutes. I think there's time for two or three speakers, on three topics: intro to the thesis, the HOPS view of measurement-driven protocol engineering, and a non-HOPS view. I've reached out to Jim Cowie (thanks Andrew for the intro) to talk about the non-HOPS view (probably focusing on bits of the infrastructure such as BGP and DNS). I can do the intro, and don't have a speaker yet for the HOPS view (though in an emergency, though, I could do this, too). ## Intro talk speaker Brian Trammell - one slide on stack evolution: what broadly are we trying to do, picture of the two-stemmed martini glass - raises a question about how much we know about what will work - a slide with basic data (the HICCUPS slide shown in Honolulu's stackevo introduction is still the newest thing we have here) -- point out we want more - outline measurement-driven protocol engineering concept, and the parts we need to make this work: - measurements we have, measurements we don't have but need - comparability and repeatability - mechanisms for in-band measurement, or gleaning information on network behavior from error logs etc. - widely distributed control and collection - one slide intro to what HOPS is now ## HOPS talk TBD, speaker TBD ## beyond HOPS talk TBD, probably focused on infrastructure, have reached out to Jim Cowie of Renesys/Dyn Research.
1. Welcome 5 minutes 0900-0905 2. Host Presentation 5 minutes 0905-0910 3. Reporting: - IETF Chair 5 minutes 0910-0915 - IAOC Chair & IAD 5 minutes 0915-0920 - IETF Trust Chair 5 minutes 0920-0925 - NomCom Chair 5 minutes 0925-0930 - IAB Chair 5 minutes 0930-0935 - IRTF Chair 5 minutes 0935-0940 - RSE 5 minutes 0940-0945 4. Technical Topic: TBD 30 minutes 0945-1015 Q&A 15 minutes 1015-1030 5. IAB Open Mic 15 minutes 1030-1045 6. IAOC Open Mic 15 minutes 1045-1100 7. IESG Open Mic 15 minutes 1100-1115
Note that this proposal is not final (as of 2015-08-25); discussions about cutting down the reporting time are ongoing.
The content of this page was last updated on 2016-09-29. It was migrated from the old IAB wiki on 2023-12-05.