Document: draft-ietf-tsvwg-udp-guidelines-09
Reviewer: Ben Campbell
Review Date:  12 Aug 2008
IESG Telechat date: 14 Aug 2008

Summary:

This draft is mostly ready for publication as a BCP. I have some primarily editorial comments that should be considered prior to final publication.

Comments:

IDNITS reports an outdated reference for draft-ietf-nsis-ntlp-15.

Section 3.1.1, paragraph 3:

I think this paragraph may be confusing to some implementors, in that you suggest monitoring packet-loss to determine fair bandwidth competition with UDP. A few worlds elaborating on how packet-loss relates to fair use of bandwidth would be helpful. An example would help even more.

Section 3.1.2, paragraph 1:

Should I take this to mean that implementing TFRC is insufficient for low-volume applications, and that they should follow the guidelines in this section even if they implement TFRC? If so, this conflicts with the previous statement that applications implementing TFRC do not need to worry about the other recommendations in section 3.1.

Paragraph 3:

The few sentences seem redundant with previous paragraph. Given that they are about pre-determined initial intervals, I assume they fit better in this paragraph than the previous.

Section 3.1.3, numbered list:

Item 1 assumes all IP-based payloads are congestion-controlled, while
2 explicitly calls out non-congestion controlled IP-based payloads. I assume the intent was for item 1 to refer just to congestion- controlled IP-based payloads.

Section 3.4, paragraph 1:

I'm not sure what what the practical meaning of "a coding point of view" is in this context.

Section 3.5, paragraph 6, last sentence:

This advice seems counter to the idea that applications should be designed to work on the internet at large, rather than for some specific network configuration. Perhaps you meant to say "The deployers of applications should investigate..."?

Section 3.5, last paragraph:

This first few sentences of this paragraph are redundant with previous text in this section.

Section 3.6, paragraph 3, first sentence:

  Sentence is ambiguous as to whether "with an IP source address..."  
refers to the received datagram or the one being sent in response. I think the sentence would be clearer if you just removed the text "in reply...UDP datagrams".

Paragraphs 4 and 5:

Is there any guidance associated with these paragraphs?