TCP ex Machina: Computer-Generated Congestion Control
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http://web.mit.edu/remy/
Remy is a computer program that figures out how computers can best cooperate to share a network.Remy creates end-to-end congestion-control algorithms that plug into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
These computer-generated algorithms can achieve higher performance and greater fairness than the most sophisticated human-designed schemes.Can we see implementation of this amazing discovery into future versions of freebsd/pfsense?
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Not so simple, it doesn't look like it is a solution that can be applied to a single machine.
Remy is designed to work on a subnetwork basis – that is, all endpoints in a subnet are running Remy. Hence, for example, on a home network, Remy's aim would be to limit local congestion by having the hosts respond in the same way to that congestion.
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It looks like there are promising ways to improve the algorithms by which TCP (on various OS implementations) handles changing its parameters (window size etc) in response to perceived network throughput/congestion. The control of all that is end-to-end in TCP - the end point systems have to do it, and they do it more or less crudely at the moment. So I don't see how it will help the routers/firewalls along the path. But yes, if you have a controlled office environment then you could implement these things (when they are actually real software available for the OSs that you have) and get your office computers doing more friendly sharing of bandwidth.
If only new IPvN had a proper QoS system, and we could pay a bit extra to our ISP to be able to set QoS parameters in packets, have the ISP respect this, and have the ISP pay the internet backbone a bit of that money to also process QoS…
