The challenges of bufferbloat remain within the networks, and previous efforts to provide indications of full buffers and to manage flow rates have not lead to their intended outcomes. A new RFC published today attempts to address this.
The deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) [RFC3168] remains stalled. While most operating systems support ECN, it is currently disabled by default because of fears that enabling ECN will break transport protocols. This document proposes a new ICMP message that a router or host may use to advise a host to reduce the rate at which it sends, in cases where the host ignores other signals such as packet loss and ECN. We call this message the “Really Explicit Congestion Notification” (RECN) message because it delivers a less subtle indication of congestion than packet loss and ECN – RFC7514 Introduction