One document matched: draft-bonaventure-diffserv-rashaper-00.txt


Internet Enginieering Task Force                     Olivier Bonaventure
INTERNET DRAFT                                                     FUNDP
<draft-bonaventure-diffserv-rashaper-00.txt>          Stefaan De Cnodder
                                                                 Alcatel

                                                              June, 1999
                                                  Expires December, 1999

           A rate adaptive shaper for differentiated services


Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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Abstract

   This memo describes two rate adaptive shapers (RAS) that can be used
   in combination with the Three Color Markers (srTCM and trTCM)
   proposed in [Heinanen1]. These RAS improve the performance of TCP
   when a TCM is used at the ingress of a diffserv network by reducing
   the burstiness of the traffic and thus increasing the proportion of
   packets marked as green by the TCM.  Simulation results showing the
   improved performance are briefly discussed in the appendix.

1. Introduction

   In DiffServ networks, the incoming data traffic, with the AF PHB in
   particular, could be subject to marking where the purpose of this
   marking is to provide a low drop probability to a minimum part of the



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   traffic whereas the excess will have a larger drop probability.  Such
   markers are mainly token bucket based such as the single rate three
   color marker (srTCM) described in [Heinanen1] and the two rates three
   color marker (trTCM) in [Heinanen2].

   Similar markers were proposed for ATM networks and simulations have
   shown that their performance with TCP traffic was not always perfect
   and several researchers have shown that these performance problems
   could be solved in two ways :

   1. increasing the burst size, i.e. increasing CBS and PBS, or

   2. shaping the incoming traffic such that a part of the burstiness is
   removed.

   The first solution has as major disadvantage that the traffic sent to
   the network can be very bursty and thus providing a low packet loss
   ratio can become difficult.  To efficiently support bursty traffic,
   additional resources such as buffer space are needed.  The major
   disadvantage of shaping is that the traffic encounters some delay in
   the shaper's buffers.

   In this document, we propose two shapers that can reduce the
   burstiness of the traffic upstream of a srTCM or trTCM. By reducing
   the burstiness of the traffic, the shapers increase the percentage of
   packets marked as greens by the TCMs and thus the overall goodput of
   the users using such a shaper. A few simulation results showing the
   usefulness of the proposed shapers may be found in the appendix.

   The structure of this document follows the structure proposed in
   [Nichols].


2. Description of the rate adaptive shapers.

 2.1. Rate adaptive shaper

   The rate adaptive shaper is based on a similar shaper proposed in
   [Bonaventure] to improve the performance of TCP with the Guaranteed
   Frame Rate [Guerin] [TM41] service category in ATM networks. Another
   type of rate adaptive shaper suitable for differentiated services was
   briefly discussed in [Azeem].  A RAS will typically be used as shown
   in figure 1 where the meter and the marker are the TCMs proposed in
   [Heinanen1] and [Heinanen2].







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                                     Result
                                  +----------+
                                  |          |
                                  |          V
                 +--------+   +-------+   +--------+
      Incoming   |        |   |       |   |        |   Outgoing
      Packet  ==>|  RAS   |==>| Meter |==>| Marker |==>Packet
      Stream     |        |   |       |   |        |   Stream
                 +--------+   +-------+   +--------+
      Figure 1. Rate adaptive shaper


   The rate adaptive shapers are thus different from the shapers
   described in [RFC2475] since they shape the traffic before the
   traffic is metered.  The main objective of the shaper is to produce
   at its output a traffic that is less bursty than the input traffic,
   but the shaper should avoid to discard packets in contrast with
   classical leaky-bucket based shapers. The shaper itself consists of a
   tail-drop FIFO queue which is emptied at a variable rate.  The
   shaping rate, i.e. the rate at which the queue is emptied, is a
   function of the occupancy of the FIFO queue. If the queue occupancy
   increases, the shaping rate will also increase in order to prevent
   loss and too large delays at the shaper.  The shaping rate is also a
   function of the average rate of the incoming traffic.  The shaper was
   designed to be used in conjunction with meters such as the TCMs
   proposed in [Heinanen1] and [Heinanen2].

   There are two types of rate adaptive shapers. The single rate rate
   adaptive shaper (srRAS) will typically be used upstream of a srTCM
   while the two rates rate adaptive shaper (trRAS) will usually be used
   upstream of a trTCM.


 2.2 Configuration of the srRAS

   The srRAS is configured by specifying four parameters : the Committed
   Information Rate (CIR), the Maximum Information Rate (MIR) and two
   buffer thresholds : CIR_th (Committed Information Rate threshold) and
   MIR_th (Maximum Information Rate threshold). The CIR shall be
   specified in bytes per second and MUST be configurable. The MIR shall
   be specified in the same unit as the MIR and SHOULD be configurable.
   To achieve a good performance, the CIR of a srRAS will usually be set
   at the same value as the CIR of the downstream srTCM.  A typical
   value for the MIR would be the line rate of the output link of the
   shaper. When the CIR and optionally the MIR are configured, the srRAS
   MUST ensure that the following relation is verified :

           CIR <= MIR <= line rate



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   The two buffer thresholds, CIR_th and MIR_th shall be specified in
   bytes or packets and SHOULD be configurable. If these thresholds are
   configured, then the srRAS MUST ensure that the following relation
   holds :

               CIR_th <= MIR_th <= buffer size of the shaper

   The CIR_th and MIR_th may depend on the values chosen for the CBS and
   the PBS in the downstream srTCM. However, this dependency does not
   need to be standardized.


 2.3 Behavior of the srRAS

   The output rate of the shaper is based on two factors. The first one
   is the (long term) average rate of the incoming traffic. This average
   rate can be computed by several means. For example, the function
   proposed in [Stoica] can be used (i.e. EARnew = [(1-exp(-
   T/K))*L/T]+exp(-T/K)*EARold where EARold is the previous value of the
   Estimated Average Rate, EARnew is the updated value, K a constant, L
   the size of the arriving packet and T the amount of time since the
   arrival of the previous packet). Other averaging functions can be
   used.

   The second factor is the instantaneous occupancy of the FIFO buffer
   of the shaper. When the buffer occupancy is below CIR_th, the output
   rate of the shaper is set to the maximum of the estimated average
   rate (EAR(t)) and the CIR. This ensures that the shaper will always
   send traffic at least at the CIR. When the buffer occupancy increases
   above CIR_th, the output rate of the shaper is computed as the
   maximum of the EAR(t) and a linear function F of the buffer occupancy
   for which F(CIR_th)=CIR and F(MIR_th)=MIR. When the buffer occupancy
   reaches the MIR_th threshold, the output rate of the shaper is set to
   the maximum information rate.  The computation of the shaping rate is
   illustrated in figure 2.
















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                   ^
     Shaping rate  |
                   |
                   |
              MIR  |                      =========
                   |                    //
                   |                  //
           EAR(t)  |----------------//
                   |              //
                   |            //
             CIR   |============
                   |
                   |
                   |
                   |------------+---------+-------------------------------->
                           CIR_th        MIR_th            Buffer occupancy
                   Figure 2 Computation of shaping rate for srRAS


 2.4 Configuration of the trRAS

   The trRAS is configured by specifying six parameters : the Committed
   Information Rate (CIR), the Peak Information Rate (PIR), the Maximum
   Information Rate (MIR) and three buffer thresholds : CIR_th, PIR_th
   and MIR_th. The CIR shall be specified in bytes per second and MUST
   be configurable. To achieve a good performance, the CIR of a srRAS
   will usually be set at the same value as the CIR of the downstream
   trTCM.  The PIR shall be specified in the same unit as the CIR and
   MUST be configurable. To achieve a good performance, the PIR of a
   trRAS will usually be set at the same value as the PIR of the
   downstream srTCM.  The MIR SHOULD be configurable and shall be
   specified in the same unit as the CIR. A typical value for the MIR
   will be the line rate of the output link of the shaper. When the
   values for CIR, PIR and optionally MIR are configured, the trRAS MUST
   ensure that the following relation is verified :

               CIR <= PIR <= MIR <= line rate

   The three buffer thresholds, CIR_th, PIR_th and MIR_th shall be
   specified in bytes or packets and SHOULD be configurable. If these
   thresholds are configured, then the trRAS MUST ensure that the
   following relation is verified:

               CIR_th <= PIR_th <= MIR_th <= buffer size of the shaper

   The CIR_th, PIR_th and MIR_th may depend on the values chosen for the
   CBS and the PBS in the downstream trTCM. However, this dependency
   does not need to be standardized.



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 2.5 Behavior of the trRAS

   The output rate of the trRAS is also based on two factors. The first
   one is the (long term) average rate of the incoming traffic. This
   average rate can be computed as for the srRAS.

   The second factor is the instantaneous occupancy of the FIFO buffer
   of the shaper. When the buffer occupancy is below CIR_th, the output
   rate of the shaper is set to the maximum of the estimated average
   rate (EAR(t)) and the CIR. This ensures that the shaper will always
   send traffic at least at the CIR. When the buffer occupancy increases
   above CIR_th, the output rate of the shaper is computed as the
   maximum of the EAR(t) and a piecewise linear function BF of the
   buffer occupancy. This piecewise function can be defined as follows.
   The first piece is between zero and CIR_th where Bf() is equal to
   CIR.  This means that when the buffer occupancy is below a certain
   threshold CIR_th, the shaping rate is at least CIR.  The second piece
   is between CIR_th and PIR_th where Bf() increases linearly from CIR
   to PIR. The third part is from PIR_th to MIR_th where Bf is increased
   from PIR to the MIR and finally when the buffer occupancy is above
   MIR_th, the shaping rate remains constant at the MIR.

   The computation of the shaping rate is illustrated in figure 3.




                   ^
     Shaping rate  |
                   |
                   |
             MIR   |                               ======
                   |                            ///
                   |                         ///
             PIR   |                      ///
                   |                    //
                   |                  //
           EAR(t)  |----------------//
                   |              //
                   |            //
             CIR   |============
                   |
                   |
                   |
                   |------------+---------+--------+------------------------>
                           CIR_th      PIR_th    MIR_th        Buffer occupancy
                           Figure 2.b Computation of shaping rate for trRAS




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3. Assumption

   The two shapers discussed in this document assume that the Internet
   traffic is dominated by protocols such as TCP that react
   appropriately to congestion by decreasing their transmission rate.
   These shapers reduce the burstiness of the traffic.

4. Example services

   The two shapers discussed in this document can be used in most
   situations where the TCMs proposed in [Heinanen1] and [Heinanen2] are
   used. In fact, simulations briefly discussed in Appendix A show that
   the performance of TCP can be improved when the trTCM is used in
   conjunction with one of the shapers described in this document than
   when the trTCM is used alone. We expect that similar simulations
   results would be found with the srTCM.

5. Security Issues

   The two shapers described in this document have no known security
   concerns.



6. References



[Azeem] Feroz Azeem, Amit Rao,Xiuping Lu and Shiv Kalyanaraman, TCP-
        Friendly Traffic Conditioners for Differentiated Services,
        draft-azeem-tcpfriendly-diffserv-00.txt, March 1999, Work in
        progress.


[Bonaventure]
        Olivier Bonaventure, "Integration of ATM under TCP/IP to provide
        services with a guaranteed minimum bandwidth", Ph. D. thesis,
        University of Liege, September 1998.


[Clark] David D. Clark, and Wenjia Fang, "Explicit Allocation of Best-
        Effort Packet Delivery Service", IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking,
        Vol. 6, No. 4, August 1998.


[Guerin]R. Guerin and J. Heinanen, UBR+ service category definition, ATM
        Forum contribution ATM96-1598, December 1996.




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[Heinanen1]
        Juha Heinanen, and Roch Guerin, "A Single Rate Three Color
        Marker", Internet draft, IETF, draft-heinanen-diffserv-srtcm-
        01.txt.  Work in progress.


[Heinanen2]
        Juha Heinanen, and Roch Guerin, "A Two Rate Three Color Marker",
        Internet draft, IETF, draft-heinanen-diffserv-trtcm-01.txt.
        Work in progress.


[Floyd1]Sally Floyd, and Van Jacobson, "Random Early Detection Gateways
        for Congestion Avoidance", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking,
        August 1993.


[Floyd2]Sally Floyd, "RED : Optimum functions for computing the drop
        probability", email available at http://www-
        nrg.ee.lbl.gov/floyd/REDfunc.txt, October 1997.


[Nichols]K. Nichols and B. Carpenter, Format for Diffserv Working Group
        Traffic Conditioner Drafts. Internet draft draft-ietf-diffserv-
        traffcon-format-00.txt, February 1999, work in progress


[RFC2475]S. Blake, et al., An Architecture for Differentiated Services.
        RFC 2475, December 1998.


[Stoica]I. Stoica and S. Shenker and H. Zhang, Core-stateless fair
        queueuing : achieving approxiamtely fair bandwidth allocations
        in high speed networks", ACM SIGCOMM98, pp. 118-130, Sept. 1998


[TM41]  ATM Forum, Traffic Management Specification, verion 4.1, 1999

Appendix

 A. Simulation results

  A.1 description of the model

        To evaluate the rate adaptive shaper through simulations, we use
        the network model depicted in Figure A.1.  In this network, we
        consider that a backbone network is used to provide a LAN Inter-
        connection service to ten pairs of LANs. Each LAN corresponds to



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        an uncongested switched 10 Mbps LAN with ten workstations
        attached to a customer router (C1-C10 in figure A.1).  The delay
        on the LAN links is set to 1 msec. The MSS size of the worksta-
        tions is set to 1460 bytes.  The workstations on the left hand
        side of the figure send traffic to companion workstations
        located on the right hand side of the figure. All traffic from
        the LAN attached to customer router C1 is sent to the LAN
        attached to customer router C1'. There are ten workstations on
        each LAN and each workstation implements SACK-TCP with a maximum
        window size of 64 KBytes.

              2.5 msec, 34 Mbps                      2.5 msec, 34 Mbps
             <-------------->                      <-------------->
        \+---+                                                     +---+/
        -| C1|--------------+                       +--------------|C1'|-
        /+---+              |                       |              +---+\
        \+---+              |                       |              +---+/
        -| C2|------------+ |                       | +------------|C2'|-
        /+---+            | |                       | |            +---+\
        \+---+            | |                       | |            +---+/
        -| C3|----------+ | |                       | | +----------|C3'|-
        /+---+          | | |                       | | |          +---+\
        \+---+          | | |                       | | |          +---+/
        -| C4|--------+ +-+----------+     +----------+-+ +--------|C4'|-
        /+---+        |   |          |     |          |   |        +---+\
        \+---+        +---|          |     |          |---+        +---+/
        -| C5|------------|   ER1    |-----|   ER2    |------------|C5'|-
        /+---+        +---|          |     |          |---+        +---+\
        \+---+        |   |          |     |          |   |        +---+/
        -| C6|--------+   +----------+     +----------+   +--------|C6'|-
        /+---+            ||||                     ||||            +---+\
        \+---+            ||||      <------->      ||||            +---+/
        -| C7|------------+|||       60 Mbps       |||+------------|C7'|-
        /+---+             |||       10 msec       |||             +---+\
        \+---+             |||                     |||             +---+/
        -| C8|-------------+||                     ||+-------------|C8'|-
        /+---+              ||                     ||              +---+\
        \+---+              ||                     ||              +---+/
        -| C9|--------------+|                     |+--------------|C9'|-
        /+---+               |                     |               +---+\
        \+---+               |                     |               +----+/
        -|C10|---------------+                     +---------------|C10'|-
        /+---+                                                     +----+\
        Figure A.1: the simulation model.


        The customer routers are connected with 34 Mbps links to the
        backbone network which is, in our case, composed of a single



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        bottleneck 34 Mbps link between the edge routers ER1 and ER2.
        The delay on all the customer-edge 34 Mbps links has been set to
        2.5 msec to model a MAN or small WAN environment.  These links
        and the customer routers are not a bottleneck in our environment
        and no losses occurs inside the edge routers.  The customer
        routers are equipped with a trTCM [Heinanen2] and mark the
        incoming traffic. The parameters of the trTCM are shown in table
        A.1.




           Table A.1: configurations of the trTCMs

           Router          CIR               PIR             Line Rate
           C1              2 Mbps            4 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C2              4 Mbps            8 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C3              6 Mbps           12 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C4              8 Mbps           16 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C5             10 Mbps           20 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C6              2 Mbps            4 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C7              4 Mbps            8 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C8              6 Mbps           12 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C9              8 Mbps           16 Mbps          34 Mbps
           C10            10 Mbps           20 Mbps          34 Mbps


        All customer routers are equipped with a trTCM where the CIR are
        2 Mbps for router C1 and C6, 4 Mbps for C2 and C7, 6 Mbps for C3
        and C8, 8 Mbps for C4 and C9 and 10 Mbps for C5 and C10. Routers
        C6-C10 also contain a trRAS in addition to the trTCM while
        routers C1-C5 only contain a trTCM.  In all simulations, the PIR
        is always twice as large as the CIR.   Also the PBS is the dou-
        ble of the CBS.  The CBS will be varied in the different simula-
        tion runs.

        The edge routers, ER1 and ER2, are connected with a 60 Mbps link
        which is the bottleneck link in our environment. These two
        routers implement the RIO algorithm [Clark] that we have
        extended to support three drop preferences instead of two. The
        thresholds of the parameters are 100 and 200 packets (minimum
        and maximum threshold, respectively) for the red packets, 200
        and 400 packets for the yellow packets and 400 and 800 for the
        green packets.  The parameter maxp of RIO was set to 0.02 and we
        used as drop function the function proposed in [Floyd2] such
        that when the average queue length exceeds the maximum thres-
        hold, the drop probability does not suddenly jumps to 1.  The
        weight to calculate the average queue length which is used by



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        RED or RIO is set to 0.002 [Floyd1].

        The simulated time is set to 102 seconds where the first two
        seconds are not used to gather TCP statistics (the so-called
        warm-up time) such as goodput.

  A.2 Simulation results

        For our first simulations, we consider that routers C1-C5 only
        utilize a trTCM while routers C6-C10 utilize a rate adaptive
        shaper in conjunction with a trTCM. All routers use a CBS of 3
        KBytes. In table A.2, we show the total goodput achieved by the
        workstations attached to each LAN as a function of the CIR of
        the trTCM used on the customer router attached to this LAN. In
        table A.3, we show the total goodput achieved by the worksta-
        tions attached to customer routers with a rate adaptive shaper.

           Table A.2: throughput in Mbps for the unshaped traffic.
                         green           yellow          total
           2Mbps [C1]    1.09            0.83            1.92
           4Mbps [C2]    2.30            1.39            3.69
           6Mbps [C3]    3.70            1.60            5.30
           8Mbps [C4]    5.47            1.66            7.13
           10Mbps [C5]   7.08            1.66            8.74

           Table A.3: throughput in Mbps for the shaped traffic.
                         green           yellow          total
           2Mbps [C6]    2.00            0.81            2.81
           4Mbps [C7]    3.98            1.08            5.06
           6Mbps [C8]    5.86            0.74            6.60
           8Mbps [C9]    7.76            0.58            8.34
           10Mbps [C10]  9.79            0.52            10.3


        This first simulation shows clearly that the workstations
        attached to an edge router with a rate adaptive shaper havea
        clear advantage, from a performance point of view, over worksta-
        tions attached to an edge router with only a trTCM. The perfor-
        mance improvement is the result of the higher proportion of
        packets marked as green by the edge routers when the rate adap-
        tive shaper is used.

        Table A.4 shows the total goodput for workstations attached to
        routers C1 (trTCM - 2_Mbps_unsh), C5 (trTCM - 10_Mbps_unsh), C6
        (trRAS and trTCM 2_Mbps_sh), and C10 (trRAS and trTCM
        10_Mbps_sh) for various values for the maximum burst size when
        the rate adaptive shaper is used.  It is clear that routers with
        the rate adaptive shaper perform better if the CBS is small.



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        However, a CBS of a few hundred KBytes is probably too large in
        many environments.



           Table A.4: goodput in Mbps (rate adaptive shaper, link rate
        is 60 Mbps) versus CBS in KBytes.
           CBS  2_Mbps_unsh     2_Mbps_sh     10_Mbps_unsh   10_Mbps_sh
           3       1.84            2.71          8.37           9.98
           10      2.62            2.40          8.09           9.68
           25      2.49            2.26          8.33           9.49
           50      2.37            2.15          8.69           9.40
           75      2.32            2.10          8.77           9.22
           100     2.35            2.11          8.88           9.17
           150     2.36            2.12          8.95           9.12
           200     2.33            2.10          9.10           9.06
           300     2.33            2.10          9.24           8.69
           400     2.33            2.04          9.32           8.77



Authors Addresses

   Olivier Bonaventure
   Institut d'Informatique (CS Dept)
   Facultes Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix
   Rue Grandgagnage 21, B-5000 Namur, Belgium.
   E-mail: Olivier.Bonaventure@info.fundp.ac.be
   URL   : http://www.info.fundp.ac.be/~obo

   Stefaan De Cnodder
   Alcatel Corporate Research Center
   Fr. Wellesplein 1, B-2018 Antwerpen, Belgium.
   Phone : 32-3-240-8515
   Fax   : 32-3-240-9932
   E-mail: stefaan.de_cnodder@alcatel.be















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