> On 1 Dec, 2019, at 9:03 pm, Sebastian Moeller <moell...@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> If less feedback is observed by the sender than intended by the AQM, growth 
>> will continue and the AQM will increase its marking to compensate, 
>> ultimately resorting to a CE mark.  
> 
> Well, that seems undesirable?

As a safety valve, getting a CE mark is greatly preferable to losing congestion 
control entirely, or incurring a packet loss as the other alternative 
congestion signal.  It would only happen if the SCE signal or feedback were 
seriously disrupted or entirely erased - the latter being the *normal* state of 
affairs when either endpoint is not SCE aware in the first place.

> Am I right to assume that the fault tolerance requires a relative steady ACK 
> stream though?

It only needs to be sufficient to keep the TCP stream flowing.  If the acks are 
bursty, that's a separate problem in which it doesn't really matter if they're 
all present or not.  And technically, the one-bit feedback mechanism is capable 
of precisely reflecting a sparse sequence of SCE marks using just two acks per 
mark.

> I fully agree that if ACK thinning is performed it really should be careful 
> to not loose information when doing its job, but SCE hopefully can deal with 
> whatever is out in the field today (I am looking at you DOCSIS uplinks...), 
> no?

Right, that's the essence of the above discussion about relative feedback 
error, which is the sort of thing that random ack loss or unprincipled ack 
thinning is likely to introduce.

Meanwhile, an ack filter that avoids dropping acks in which the reserved flag 
bits differ from its successor will not lose any information in the one-bit 
scheme.  This is what's implemented in Cake (except that not all the reserved 
bits are covered yet, only the one we use).

 - Jonathan Morton

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