[tor-dev] Fairness between circuits

[Björn Scheuermann]

Hi,

> I agree with most of Björn's post, but disagree slightly here:

I fully agree with what Ian said, except for one point. ;)

> The EWMA stuff isn't _trying_ to be fair; it's explicitly trying to
> prioritize circuits for which users will gain utility from lower
> latency, and deprioritize circuits for which users don't care about
> latency.  That said, it's still kind of fair, as circuits with similar
> usage patterns will get similar service.
> 
> The main difference is that if you've got a bunch of circuits that need
> servicing, a fair round-robin doesn't care if you service them in the
> order A,B,C,D,E,A,B,C,D,E or E,B,A,C,D,E,B,A,C,D, or even
> E,B,D,A,C,A,E,B,C,D.  All are equally fair.  The observation in our CCS
> paper is that it _does_ matter to the user, if some of the circuits are
> interactive, and others are not.  Indeed, if A is interactive and hasn't
> sent packets in a while, it might get A,A,A,C,E,B,D so that it can
> "catch up".

I think this is also a question of the time scale. If the queues are
excessively long due to non-working congestion control as in current
Tor, then this is certainly an issue - because you can save significant
time by scheduling in the right order. If the queues are short and
scheduling is more fine-grained than now, then the minimal resulting
time differences will not matter.

As I said in my previous mail, it is still conceivable to implement
something along similar lines with our proposal. In the end, this would
mean the introduction of (short-term) unfairness in order to give a
(short-term) advantage to interactive traffic. This can be done without
hurting the long-term fairness between circuits. However, it would
increase the complexity, and thus significantly reduces our chances to
understand what happens and why it happens.

It may well turn out that this is beneficial - this remains to be
assessed at some point further down the road. For the moment, my guts
tell me that the problem will not exist to the same extent. My guts
might be wrong with that, and we should verify that once the ideas have
become a bit more stable. If I am right, however, we should IMHO seize
the opportunity to reduce the system complexity if it doesn't hurt
performance.


Best regards

Björn


-- 
Prof. Dr. Björn Scheuermann
Chair of Computer Science VII (Robotics and Telematics)
University of Würzburg
Am Hubland, 97074 Würzburg, Germany

Tel.: +49 931 31 85402
scheuermann at informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
http://www7.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de