| Internet-Draft | title | November 2021 |
| Hardaker | Expires 13 May 2022 | [Page] |
The Measuring Network Quality for End-Users workshop was held virtually by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) in September, 2021. This workshop summarizes the workshop, the topics discussed and some preliminary conclusions drawn at the end of the workshop.¶
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The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) holds occasional workshops designed to consider long-term issues and strategies for the Internet, and to suggest future directions for the Internet architecture. This long-term planning function of the IAB is complementary to the ongoing engineering efforts performed by working groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).¶
The Measuring Network Quality for End-Users workshop was held virtually by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) in September, 2021. This workshop summarizes the workshop, the topics discussed and some preliminary conclusions drawn at the end of the workshop.¶
The Internet in 2021 is quite different from what it was 10 years ago. Today, it is a crucial part of everyone's daily life. People use the Internet for their social life, for their daily jobs, for routine shopping, and for keeping up with major events. An increasing number of people can access a Gigabit connection, which would be hard to imagine a decade ago. And, thanks to improvements in security, people trust the Internet for both planning their finances and for everyday payments.¶
At the same time, some aspects of end-user experience have not improved as much. Many users have typical connection latency that remains at decade-old levels. Despite significant reliability improvements in data center environments, end users often see interruptions in service. Despite algorithmic advances in the field of control theory, one can often find that the queuing delay in the last-mile equipment exceeds the accumulted transit delay. Transport improvements, such as QUIC, Multipath TCP, and TCP Fast Open are still not fully supported in some networks. Likewise, various advances in the security and privacy of user data are not widely supported, such as encrypted DNS to the local resolver.¶
Some of the major factors behind this lack of progress is the popular perception that throughput is the often sole measure of the quality of Internet connectivity. With such narrow focus, the workshop aimed to discuss various questions:¶
The Measuring Network Quality for End-Users for divided into the following main topic areas:¶
The three day workshop was broken into four separate sections, including introductory material and conclusions, that each played a role in framing the discussions.¶
The Introduction section allowed participants to introduce and discuss the problem space, existing mechanisms for QoS and QoE measurements. Also discussed was the interaction between multiple users within the Network, as well as the interaction between multiple layers of the OSI stack. Some existing measurement works were presented. Vint Cerf provided a key note support describing the history and importance of the topic.¶
The Metrics section of the workshop concentrated on both defining new and existing measures and how they might apply to different sections of the Internet. The need for improvements to latency and its measurements was heavily discussed, especially for certain classes of users such as live, collaborative content and gaming.¶
In the Cross-layer section participants present material and discussed how accurately measuring exactly where problems occur is difficult when many components of a network connection can affect the measurement. Discussion centered especially on the differences between physically wired and wireless connections and the difficulties of accurately determining problem spots when multiple different network types are responsible the quality.¶
During the final hour of the workshop we gathered statements that group thought were summary statements from the 3 day event. We later discarded any that were in contention (listed further below for completeness). For this document, the editor took the original list and divided it into rough categories, applied some suggested edits discussed on the mailing list and further edited for clarity and to provide context.¶
Additional statements were recorded that did not have consensus of the group at the time, but we list here for completeness about the fact they were discussed:¶
There was discussion during the workshop about where future work should be performed. The group agreed that some work could be done more immediately within existing IETF working groups, while other longer-term research may be needed in IRTF groups.¶
A few security relevant topics were discussed at the workshop, including but not limited to:¶
The following is a list of participants attended the workshop over a remote connection:¶
IAB Members at the Time of Approval¶
Internet Architecture Board members at the time this document was approved for publication were:¶
Jari Arkko Deborah Brungard Ben Campbell Lars Eggert Wes Hardaker Cullen Jennings Mirja Kühlewind Zhenbin Li Jared Mauch Tommy Pauly Colin Perkins David Schinazi Russ White Jiankang Yao¶
Acknowledgements¶
The authors would like to thank the workshop participants, the members of the IAB, and the program committee for creating and participating in many interesting discussions.¶
While this document is under development, it can be viewed, tracked, fill here:¶
https://github.com/intarchboard/network-quality-workshop-report¶