The IESG has received a request from the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions WG (tcpm) to consider the following document: - 'TCP Alternative Backoff with ECN (ABE)' <draft-ietf-tcpm-alternativebackoff-ecn-09.txt> as Experimental RFC The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2018-08-28. Exceptionally, comments may be sent to iesg@ietf.org instead. In either case, please retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting. Abstract Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms allow for burst tolerance while enforcing short queues to minimise the time that packets spend enqueued at a bottleneck. This can cause noticeable performance degradation for TCP connections traversing such a bottleneck, especially if there are only a few flows or their bandwidth-delay- product is large. The reception of a Congestion Experienced (CE) ECN mark indicates that an AQM mechanism is used at the bottleneck, and therefore the bottleneck network queue is likely to be short. Feedback of this signal allows the TCP sender-side ECN reaction in congestion avoidance to reduce the Congestion Window (cwnd) by a smaller amount than the congestion control algorithm's reaction to inferred packet loss. This specification therefore defines an experimental change to the TCP reaction specified in RFC3168, as permitted by RFC 8311. The file can be obtained via https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tcpm-alternativebackoff-ecn/ IESG discussion can be tracked via https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tcpm-alternativebackoff-ecn/ballot/ No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.
