File formats:

Status:

INFORMATIONAL

Author:

S. Floyd, Ed.

Stream:

IRTF

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DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC5166

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Abstract

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. This document is the first in a series of documents aimed at improving the models that we use in the evaluation of transport protocols.

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 trade-offs 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 trade-offs between a range of metrics, rather than in terms of optimizing for a single metric. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

For the definition of Status, see RFC 2026.

For the definition of Stream, see RFC 8729.