Code change:
multipath negotiation is ambiguous, they MUST be interpreted as acknowledging packets sent on path 0. <del> Endpoints negotiate the use of one packet number space for all paths or separate packet number spaces per path during the connection handshake nego.  While separate packet number spaces allow for more efficient ACK encoding, especially when paths have highly different latencies, this approach requires the use of a connection ID. Therefore use of a single number space can be beneficial when endpoints use zero-length connection ID for less overhead. </del> 7.1. <del> If the multipath option is negotiated to use one packet number space for all paths, the packet sequence numbers are allocated from the common number space, so that, for example, packet number N could be sent on one path and packet number N+1 on another. ACK frames report the numbers of packets that have been received so far, regardless of the path on which they have been received.  That means the senders needs to maintain an association between sent packet numbers and the path over which these packets were sent.  This is necessary to implement per path congestion control. When a packet is acknowledged, the state of the congestion control MUST be updated for the path where the acknowledged packet was originally sent.  The RTT is calculated based on the delay between the transmission of that packet and its first acknowledgement (see compute-rtt) and is used to update the RTT statistics for the sending path. Also loss detection MUST be adapted to allow for different RTTs on different paths.  For example, timer computations should take into account the RTT of the path on which a packet was sent.  Detections based on packet numbers shall compare a given packet number to the highest packet number received for that path. </del> <ins> If a zero-length connection ID is used, one packet number space for all paths.  That means the packet sequence numbers are allocated from the common number space, so that, for example, packet number N could be sent on one path and packet number N+1 on another. In this case, ACK frames report the numbers of packets that have been received so far, regardless of the path on which they have been received.  That means the senders needs to maintain an association between sent packet numbers and the path over which these packets were sent.  This is necessary to implement per path congestion control, as explained in zero-length-cid-loss-and-congestion. Further, the receiver of packets with zero-length connection IDs should implement handling of acknowledgements as defined in sending- acknowledgements-and-handling-ranges. ECN handing is specified in ecn-handling, and mitigation of the RTT measurement is further explained in ack-delay-and-zero-length-cid- considerations. If a node does not want to implement this logic, it MAY instead limit its use of multiple paths as explained in restricted-sending-to-zero- length-cid-peer. </ins> 7.1.1. <ins> If zero-length CID and therefore also a single packet number space is used by the sender, the receiver MAY send ACK frames instead of ACK_MP frames to reduce overhead as the additional path ID field will anyway always carry the same value. </ins> If senders decide to send packets on paths with different transmission delays, some packets will very likely be received out of order.  This will cause the ACK frames to carry multiple ranges of

Related discussion:
text: However, that required significant improvements in the code: to obtain good loss efficiency, picoquic remembers not just the path on which a packet was sent, but also the order of the packet on this path, i.e. a "virtual sequence number". The loss detection logic then operates on that virtual sequence number. to contain ACK size, picoquic implements a prioritization logic to select the most important ranges in an ACK, avoid acking the same range more than 3 or 4 times, and keep knowledge of already acknowledged ranges so range coalescing works. I think these improvements are good in general, and I will keep them in the implementations whether we go for single space or not. The virtual sequence number is for example useful if the CID changes for reasons not related to path changes in multiple number space variants. It is also useful in unipath variants to avoid interference between sequence numbers used in probes and the RACK logic. The ACK size improvements do reduce the size of ACKs in presence of out of order delivery, e.g., if the network is doing some kind of internal load balancing. On the other hand, the improvements are somewhat complex, would need to be described in separate drafts, and pretty much contradicts the "simplicity of code" argument. So we are left with the "Null length CID" issue. I see for cases: Client CID Priority ----------------------- long Used by many implementations NULL Preferred configuration of many big deployments long Rarely used, server load balancing does not work NULL Only mentioned in some P2P deployments The point here is that it is somewhat hard to deploy a large server with NULL CID and use server load balancing. This configuration is mostly favored by planned P2P deployments.
The big debate is for the configuration with NULL CID on client, long CID on server. The packets from server to client do not carry a CID, and only the last bytes of the sequence number. The client will need some logic to infer the full sequence number before decrypting the packet. The client could maybe use the incoming 5 tuple as part of the logic, but it is not obvious. It is much simpler to assume a direct map from destination CID to number space. That means, if a peer uses a NULL CID, all packets sent to that peer are in the same number space.