One document matched: draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.txt

Differences from draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-00.txt


TSVWG                                                        B. Briscoe 
Internet Draft                                               P. Eardley  
draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.txt                           D. Songhurst  
Expires: September 2006                                              BT 
 
                                                        F. Le Faucheur 
                                                              A. Charny 
                                                              V. Liatsos 
                                                    Cisco Systems, Inc 
 
                                                           J. Babiarz 
                                                                K. Chan 
                                                            S. Dudley 
                                                               Nortel 
 
                                                         6 March, 2006 
                                      
                    Pre-Congestion Notification marking 
                     draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.txt 


Status of this Memo 

   By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that       
   any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is       
   aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she       
   becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of       
   BCP 79. 

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering 
   Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that 
   other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
   Drafts. 

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months 
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any 
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference 
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." 

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at 
        http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt 

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at 
        http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html 

   This Internet-Draft will expire on September 2006. 


 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 1] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

Copyright Notice 

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).  All Rights Reserved. 

Abstract 

   Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) builds on the concepts of RFC 3168, 
   "The addition of Explicit Congestion Notification to IP". However, 
   Pre-Congestion Notification aims at providing notification before any 
   congestion actually occurs. Pre-Congestion Notification is applied to 
   real-time flows (such as voice, video and multimedia streaming) in 
   DiffServ networks. As described in [CL-ARCH], it enables "pre" 
   congestion control through two procedures, flow admission control and 
   flow pre-emption. The draft proposes algorithms that determine when a 
   PCN-enabled router writes Admission Marking and Pre-emption Marking 
   in a packet header, depending on the traffic level. The draft also 
   proposes how to encode these markings. We present simulation results 
   with PCN working in an edge-to-edge scenario using the marking 
   algorithms described. Other marking algorithms will be investigated 
   in the future. 

    

Conventions used in this document 

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this 
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. 

Table of Contents 

    
   1. Overview....................................................4 
      1.1. Introduction...........................................4 
      1.2. Terminology............................................8 
   2. Admission Marking algorithm..................................9 
      2.1. Outline................................................9 
      2.2. Virtual queue based algorithm for Admission Marking......9 
      2.3. Admission control within a CL-region using Pre-Congestion 
      Notification...............................................11 
   3. Pre-emption Marking........................................12 
      3.1. Outline...............................................12 
      3.2. Token bucket based algorithm for Pre-emption Marking....12 
      3.3. Flow pre-emption within a CL-region using Pre-Congestion 
      Notification...............................................15 
   4. Simulation results.........................................16 
   5. Encoding the Admission Marked and Pre-emption Marked states..17 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 2] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   6. Acknowledgements...........................................19 
   7. Comments solicited.........................................19 
   8. Changes from earlier version of the draft...................19 
   9. Appendix A: Explicit Congestion Notification................20 
   10. Appendix B - Details of simulations........................22 
      10.1. Network and signalling model..........................22 
      10.2. Simulated Traffic types...............................23 
         10.2.1. Voice CBR........................................24 
         10.2.2. On-off traffic approximating voice with silence 
         compression.............................................24 
         10.2.3. High-rate on-off traffic.........................24 
      10.3. Admission Control Simulations.........................24 
         10.3.1. Summary of the key parameters for CAC............24 
            10.3.1.1. Virtual Queue settings......................24 
            10.3.1.2. Egress measurement parameters...............25 
         10.3.2. Overview of the Admission Control Results.........25 
         10.3.3. Sensitivity to Poisson Arrivals assumption........27 
         10.3.4. Sensitivity to marking parameters................29 
         10.3.5. Sensitivity to RTT...............................30 
         10.3.6. Future Work for Admission Control Experiments.....31 
      10.4. Flow Pre-emption Simulations..........................31 
         10.4.1. Flow Pre-emption Model and key parameters.........31 
         10.4.2. Summary of Flow Pre-emption Experiments...........33 
         10.4.3. Future Work on Flow Pre-emption Experiments.......33 
   11. Appendix C - Alternative ways of encoding the Admission Marked 
   and Pre-emption Marked States..................................35 
      11.1. Alternative 1........................................35 
      11.2. Alternative 2........................................35 
      11.3. Alternative 3........................................36 
      11.4. Alternative 4........................................36 
      11.5. Alternative 5........................................37 
      11.6. Comparison of Alternatives............................37 
         11.6.1. How compatible is the encoding scheme with RFC 3168 
         ECN?....................................................38 
         11.6.2. Does the encoding scheme allow an "ECN-nonce"?....40 
         11.6.3. Does the encoding scheme require new DSCP(s)?.....41 
         11.6.4. Impact on measurements...........................42 
         11.6.5. Other issues.....................................42 
   12. References................................................43 
   Authors' Addresses............................................45 
   Intellectual Property Statement................................46 
   Disclaimer of Validity........................................47 
   Copyright Statement...........................................47 
    



 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 3] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

1. Overview  

1.1. Introduction 

   Pre-Congestion Notification builds on the concepts of RFC 3168, "The 
   addition of Explicit Congestion Notification to IP". Pre-Congestion 
   Notification is applied to real-time flows (such as voice, video and 
   multimedia streaming) in DiffServ-enabled networks. The reader is 
   referred to [CL-ARCH] for description of how PCN enables "pre" 
   congestion control through two procedures, flow admission control and 
   flow pre-emption. Flow admission control determines whether a new 
   microflow is added into the network. Flow pre-emption reduces the 
   current traffic load by terminating selected microflows.  

   Note this draft concerns the admission control and pre-emption of 
   *flows*, not of packets. 

   Appendix A provides a brief summary of Explicit Congestion 
   Notification (ECN) [RFC3168]. It specifies that a router sets the ECN 
   field to the Congestion Experienced (CE) value as a warning of 
   incipient congestion. RFC3168 doesn't specify a particular algorithm 
   for setting the CE codepoint, although RED (Random Early Detection) 
   is expected to be used. RFC3168 states that "specifications for 
   Diffserv PHBs [RFC2475] MAY provide more specifics" on the CE marking 
   algorithm. This document can be seen as effectively providing such 
   "specifics" for PHBs targeting real time services. We imagine future 
   specifications for Diffserv PHBs MAY define their ECN marking 
   algorithm by reference to this document. In particular we imagine a 
   CL PHB definition would refer to EF [RFC3246] for its scheduling 
   behaviour and to this draft for its ECN marking behaviour. However, 
   currently this draft merely documents pre-congestion notification 
   algorithms and encoding schemes that we believe are reasonably good, 
   but not necessarily the best. On-going work will consider various 
   alternatives and reach rough consensus on the best. 

   This draft does not propose to change the name of the ECN field. The 
   term PCN is solely used for the marking process. So we say pre-
   congestion marking is applied to the ECN field (not to the PCN 
   field). We also keep the names of the ECN codepoints, except wherever 
   new codepoint semantics are required. When we talk of PCN-routers, we 
   mean routers arranged so that they will use PCN to mark packets 
   carrying specific, configured DSCPs. PCN routers will still use 
   default ECN semantics to mark packets carrying other DSCPs.  

   A router enabled with Pre-Congestion Notification marks packets at a 
   lower traffic level than an ECN-router, when there still isn't any 
   significant build-up of real-time packets in the queue. So PCN-marked 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 4] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   packets act as an "early warning" that the amount of packets flowing 
   is getting close to the engineered capacity and hence indicate to the 
   admission control system that requests to admit new real-time flows 
   should be rejected.   

   In addition to admission control, another essential Quality of 
   Service feature in deployed networks is the ability to cope with 
   failures of nodes and links. In this situation the network's capacity 
   is reduced and selected flows may need to be terminated (pre-empted) 
   in order to preserve the quality of service of the remaining real-
   time flows. Therefore PCN-routers also include the ability to PCN-
   mark packets to alert that flow pre-emption may be needed.  

   So a PCN-router needs to be configured with two reference rates: 

   o configured-admission-rate  

   o configured-pre-emption-rate 

   Clearly flow pre-emption should happen at a higher traffic rate than 
   admission control. Both these rates will be lower than the physical 
   line rate.  

   Note that admission control is the primary mechanism used to prevent 
   congestion from occurring and flow pre-emption would rarely be 
   invoked under normal conditions; it is a safety mechanism to prevent 
   congestion from persisting after link failures, re-routes and other 
   similar events.  

   Together, admission control and flow pre-emption protect the 
   forwarding service offered to admitted and non-pre-empted flows, as 
   well as protecting service to the traffic classes using the remainder 
   of the link capacity. 

   Note well that a PCN-router does not achieve admission control or 
   flow pre-emption on its own. Just like ECN, a PCN router requires a 
   feedback system in order to control the load causing the congestion 
   it is suffering. [CL-ARCH] describes a framework to achieve an end-
   to-end controlled load service by using - within a large region of 
   the Internet - DiffServ and edge-to-edge distributed measurement-
   based admission control and flow pre-emption. Controlled load (CL) 
   service is a quality of service (QoS) closely approximating the QoS 
   that the same flow would receive from a lightly loaded network 
   element [RFC2211]. The edge-to-edge region (which we call the CL-
   region) is a controlled environment, in that all routers in the CL-
   region are enabled with Pre-Congestion Notification and packets can 
   only enter / leave the CL-region through (enhanced) gateways. PCN-
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 5] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   marked packets are detected by an egress gateway and associated 
   information is sent to the relevant ingress gateway to decide whether 
   to admit a new flow, or even pre-empt an existing flow. [CL-ARCH] 
   also describes a number of assumptions about the CL-region, such as 
   that there are a large number of real-time flows between each pair of 
   gateways; hence the CL-region is typically the backbone of an 
   operator.  

    

   We also would like to use PCN-routers in other frameworks, such as:  

   o Where the CL-region spans networks run by different operators.  

   o End-host to end-host, i.e. a similar architecture to that 
      described in [RTECN] 

   o a similar architecture to that described in [RMD] 

   These scenarios are for further study as some of the assumptions made 
   about the CL-region in [CL-ARCH] no longer hold. We plan later drafts 
   to describe if and how PCN can work in these frameworks.  

    
    
   This document describes Pre-Congestion Notification: 

   o (Section 2) The algorithm that determines when a packet is marked 
      so as to warn the admission control mechanism that admission 
      control may be needed 

   o (Section 3) The algorithm that determines when a packet is marked 
      so as to warn the pre-emption mechanism that pre-emption may be 
      needed 

   o (Section 4 & Appendix B) Simulation results that demonstrate the 
      effectiveness of stateless admission control and flow pre-emption. 
      The results were obtained using the algorithms of Sections 2 and 
      3. The pdf version of this document includes graphs of simulation 
      results that aren't in the text version. It can be found at 
      http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/projects/ipe2eqos/gqs/pape
      rs/draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.pdf   

   o (Section 5 & Appendix C) How to encode the markings, i.e. what 
      change to make to which bits of a packet so as to convey the 
      admission marking and pre-emption marking to the admission control 
      and pre-emption mechanisms on the egress gateway  
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 6] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

    

   Sections 2 and 3 describe the algorithms a PCN-enabled router uses to 
   decide whether it needs to set a packet into the Admission Marked or 
   Pre-emption Marked state. The algorithms are driven by the amount of 
   traffic in the specified real-time service class. Note that the 
   measurement is made on an aggregate basis, i.e. it doesn't 
   distinguish between real-time microflows. We present example 
   implementations but the same effect may be implemented in different 
   ways. Indeed, both the admission control and pre-emption algorithms 
   could have been implemented as variants of token buckets, but the 
   former is implemented as a virtual queue, to present an alternative 
   (yet still fairly similar) implementation. 

                          +------------+          
                          |   Result   |           
                          |            V         
                      +-------+    +--------+ 
                      | Bulk  |    |  PCN   | 
       Packets    ===>| Meter |===>| Marker |===> Marked Packets  
                      |       |    |        |           
                      +-------+    +--------+ 
 
   Figure 1: Block Diagram of Meter and Marker Function 

   In Sections 2 and 3 we also hint at how Pre-Congestion Notification 
   can be used within the CL-region, in order to achieve measurement-
   based admission control and flow pre-emption "edge-to-edge" across 
   the CL-region. Details are in [CL-ARCH]. 

   Section 4 reports some simulation results obtained using these 
   algorithms in the CL-region framework. Note that the aim of our 
   simulations is to demonstrate to the IETF community that these 
   measurement-based admission control and flow pre-emption mechanisms 
   work successfully. It isn't to show that the particular marking 
   algorithms simulated are the optimum ones; although we believe they 
   are a reasonably good choice, on-going work will compare them with 
   various alternatives. 

   Section 5 presents one possibility for how to encode the markings. 
   Although we believe it is a reasonable choice, there are other 
   possibilities, some of which are listed and discussed in Appendix C. 
   We seek advice and debate as to what scheme should be standardised. 
   Note that the choice of how to encode the markings is non-trivial 

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 7] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   because we have five things we potentially want to encode, and only 
   have four states in the two bits of the ECN field: 

   o Admission Marking - the traffic level is such that the router 
      Admission Marks the packet  

   o Pre-emption Marking - the traffic level is such that the router 
      Pre-emption Marks the packet 

   o ECT(0) - the first ECT codepoint, for backwards compatibility with 
      the ECN nonce 

   o ECT(1) - the other ECT codepoint, for backwards compatibility with 
      the ECN nonce 

   o Not ECT - to indicate to a router that the traffic is not PCN-
      capable.  

    

1.2. Terminology  

   o Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN): two new algorithms that 
      determine when a PCN-enabled router Admission Marks and Pre-
      emption Marks a packet, depending on the traffic level.  

   o Admission Marking condition- the traffic level is such that the 
      router Admission Marks packets. The router provides an "early 
      warning" that the load is nearing the engineered admission control 
      capacity, before there is any significant build-up of CL packets 
      in the queue. 

   o Pre-emption Marking condition- the traffic level is such that the 
      router Pre-emption Marks packets. The router warns explicitly that 
      pre-emption may be needed. 

   o Configured-admission-rate - the reference rate used by the 
      admission marking algorithm in a PCN-enabled router.   

   o Configured-pre-emption-rate - the reference rate used by the pre-
      emption marking algorithm in a PCN-enabled router. 

    

    


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 8] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

2. Admission Marking algorithm 

2.1. Outline  

   A PCN-enabled router monitors the aggregate traffic in the specified 
   real-time service class. Based on this measurement, the probability 
   that the router sets a packet into the Admission Marked state is 
   determined by the algorithm detailed below, configured to use the 
   configured-admission-rate. The algorithm ensures that packets are set 
   into the Admission Marked state before the actual queue builds up, 
   but when it is in danger of doing so soon; the probability increases 
   with the danger. Hence such packets act as an "early warning" that 
   the engineered capacity is nearly reached, and that no more real-time 
   flows should be admitted. 

2.2. Virtual queue based algorithm for Admission Marking 

   In order to make the description more specific we assume a virtual 
   queue is used; other implementations are possible. By a virtual queue 
   we mean a *conceptual* queue - it doesn't store packets, it is just 
   an integer. The integer represents the dynamically changing length of 
   a queue that would exist if the real-time packets were drained at the 
   configured-admission-rate instead of the real scheduling rate for the 
   relevant PHB. Note that there is a virtual queue for each outgoing 
   link and it operates in bulk and not per microflow, i.e. the same 
   virtual queue is used for all the real-time packets on that link. The 
   virtual queue could be implemented, for example, with a variation of 
   a leaky bucket. 

   The virtual queue is: 

   o Emptied at the configured-admission-rate, which is slower (perhaps 
      considerably slower) than the link speed and the relevant PHB 
      scheduling rate. This provides a safety margin to minimise the 
      chances of unnecessarily triggering the pre-emption mechanism, for 
      instance. 

   o Filled when a packet arrives carrying a DSCP that has been 
      configured for PCN (even if the packet is already admission or 
      pre-emption marked). The amount added is the same as the number of 
      octets in the packet.  

   The procedure is visualised in Figure 2: 

 
 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006                [Page 9] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

            _________________      _________________      ____________ 
PCN        |increment length |    | calculate       |    |decide      | 
packet --> |of virtual queue | -> |probability of   | -> |whether to  | 
arrives    | by size of      |    |admission marking|    |admission   | 
           |   packet        |    | packet          |    |mark packet | 
            -----------------      -----------------      ------------ 
Figure 2: Router action to support admission marking 
    

   The router computes the probability that the packet should be set 
   into the Admission Marked state according to the size of the virtual 
   queue, using the following RED-like algorithm: 

   Size of virtual queue < min-marking-threshold, probability = 0; 

   min-marking-threshold < Size of virtual queue < max-marking-
   threshold,  

     probability = (Size of virtual queue - min-marking-threshold) / 
     (max-marking-threshold - min-marking-threshold); 

   Size of virtual queue > max-marking-threshold, probability = 1 

Probability   ^ 
of setting    | 
packet into   | 
Admission   1_|                   _______________ 
Marked        |                  / 
state         |                 / 
              |                / 
              |               / 
              |              / 
              |             / 
              |            / 
            0_|___________/ 
              | 
               -----------|-------|--------------> 
                         min-    max-          Size of virtual queue 
                     marking-    marking-        
                    threshold    threshold    
 
Figure 3: Probability of router setting a packet into the Admission 
Marked state 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 10] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   So if the CL traffic is sustained at a level greater than the 
   configured-admission-rate then all packets are eventually admission 
   marked. However, a short burst of traffic at greater than the 
   configured-admission-rate (measured over the burst) may not trigger 
   any admission marking if the burst is sufficiently short that the 
   virtual queue doesn't grow beyond the min-marking-threshold. 

   A packet that is already pre-emption marked is never re-marked to the 
   admission marked state. The decision whether to set a particular 
   packet into the Admission Marked state is made on a per-packet basis 
   i.e. independently of the decision for the previous packet.   

2.3. Admission control within a CL-region using Pre-Congestion 
   Notification 

   As an example of how the Admission Marking algorithm enables 
   admission control, we briefly consider the edge-to-edge framework 
   described in [CL-ARCH]. As real-time packets enter a CL-region, they 
   are re-marked to enable PCN marking using the CL DSCP and the 
   appropriate ECT field. As these CL-packets travel across the edge-to-
   edge CL-region, nodes may set the packets into the Admission Marked 
   state, as determined by the algorithm described above. The egress 
   gateway of the region measures the fraction of the real-time traffic 
   that is in the Admission Marked state, with a separate measurement 
   made for traffic from each ingress gateway. It calculates the 
   fraction as an exponentially weighted moving average (which we term 
   Congestion-Level-Estimate, or CLE). When signalling for a new flow 
   arrives at the egress gateway, it reports the CLE to the CL-region's 
   ingress gateway piggy-backed on the signalling. The ingress gateway 
   only admits the new real-time microflow if the CLE is less than the 
   CLE-threshold. Hence previously accepted microflows are protected and 
   so suffer minimal queuing delay, jitter and loss. 

    

    

    

    

    





 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 11] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

3. Pre-emption Marking 

3.1. Outline  

   A PCN-enabled router monitors the aggregate traffic in the specified 
   real-time service class. Based on this measurement, when the rate of 
   real-time traffic exceeds the configured-pre-emption-rate for some 
   time, the router will set packets into the Pre-emption Marked state 
   as determined by the algorithm detailed below. The configured-pre-
   emption-rate is less than the link speed and less than the relevant 
   PHB scheduling rate, so that Pre-emption Marked packets act as an 
   explicit alert that the engineered capacity is nearly reached, and 
   that some real-time flows may need to be pre-empted. This minimises 
   the chances of a router randomly dropping packets, and hence the 
   Quality of Service of the remaining flows is fully preserved. Also, 
   service is preserved to traffic in other service classes using the 
   remaining capacity.  

   Pre-emption Marking of packets is similar in motivations to ECN-
   marking of packets in [RFC3168]. With [RFC3168] feedback of an ECN-
   marked packet causes the TCP source to halve its effective rate, 
   whereas in our mechanism feedback of pre-emption marking enables an 
   upstream node to terminate real-time flow(s). Pre-emption is 
   therefore more aggressive against selected flows, but the gain is 
   that it enables the full QoS of the remaining flows to be preserved. 
   Note that in [RFC3168] ECN-marking a given packet is intended to 
   result in rate adjustment of the flow to which the packet belongs; 
   while in this draft and [CL-ARCH], Pre-emption marking a packet 
   simply provides an indication that pre-emption may be needed and the 
   pre-emption algorithm will then select flows to be pre-empted 
   independently of which flow the marked packet belonged to.  

    

3.2. Token bucket based algorithm for Pre-emption Marking 

   In order to make the description more specific we assume a token 
   bucket is used; other implementations are possible.  

   All PCN routers maintain a token bucket per outgoing link: 

   o Tokens are added at the configured-pre-emption-rate, which is 
      slower than the link speed (and the relevant PHB scheduling rate).  




 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 12] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   o Tokens are removed when a real-time packet arrives; the amount 
      removed is the same as the number of octets in the packet. 
      However, if the real-time packet has already been Pre-emption 
      marked, then tokens are not removed. Also, if there are 
      insufficient tokens (because removing them would cause a negative 
      number of tokens in the token bucket), then tokens are not removed 
      and the packet is set into the Pre-emption Marked state. This 
      procedure is visualised in Figure 4.  

    

                _   _ 
               /     \              
              /packet \           ----------------    
RT packet    /  in     \     Y   |Don't remove    | 
arrives --->/Pre-emption\ -----> |any tokens from | 
            \ Marked    /        |token bucket    | 
             \ state?  /          ---------------- 
              \       /                  ^ 
               \_   _/                   | 
                  |                      | 
                N |               --------------- 
                  |              | Set pkt into  | 
                  |              | Pre-emption   | 
                  |              | Marked state  | 
                  |                --------------       
                  v                      ^ 
                _   _                    | 
               /     \                   |              
              / are   \                  |              
             / there   \                N|      
            /sufficient \----------------+       
            \ tokens in /               Y|        ------------------- 
             \ token   /                 |       |  Remove tokens    | 
              \bucket?/                  +-----> | (= octets in pkt) | 
               \_   _/                           | from token bucket | 
                                                  ------------------ 
 
Figure 4: Router action to support explicit pre-emption alerting  
    

    

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 13] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   The router computes the probability that an 'unmarked' packet should 
   be set into the Pre-emption Marked state according to the amount of 
   tokens in the token bucket: 

   Size of packet <= tokens in token bucket, probability = 0; 

   Size of packet >  tokens in token bucket, probability = 1. 

   'Unmarked' here means 'not in the Pre-emption Marked state'. 

    

Probability   
of setting      ^  
unmarked-packet |  
into            |  
Pre-emption   1_|___________             
Marked          |           |  
state           |           |  
                |           |  
                |           |  
                |           |  
                |           |  
                |           |  
                |           |  
                |           |  
              0_|           |__________________ 
                |            
                 -----------|------------------>  
                           size of          Amount of tokens 
                           packet           in token bucket 
  
 
Figure 5: Probability of router setting a packet into Pre-emption 
Marked state 
    

   So if the CL traffic is sustained at a level greater than the 
   configured-pre-emption-rate then 'unmarked' packet arrivals in excess 
   of this rate (but not those below it) are pre-emption marked. 
   However, a short burst of traffic at greater than the configured-pre-
   emption-rate (measured over the burst) may not trigger any pre-


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 14] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   emption marking if the burst is sufficiently short that the token 
   bucket doesn't run out of tokens. 

    

3.3. Flow pre-emption within a CL-region using Pre-Congestion 
   Notification 

   As an example of how the Pre-emption Marking algorithm enables flow 
   pre-emption, we briefly consider the edge-to-edge framework described 
   in [CL-ARCH]. As real-time packets travel across the edge-to-edge CL-
   region, nodes may set the packets into the Pre-emption Marked state, 
   as determined by the algorithm described above.   

   When the egress gateway of the region detects a Pre-emption Marked 
   packet, it measures the rate of real-time traffic *excluding* any 
   packets that are set into the Pre-emption Marked state. Hence it 
   measures the amount of traffic that the network can actually support 
   safely (which we term Sustainable-Aggregate-Rate). The measurement is 
   made for traffic from a particular ingress gateway, and then reported 
   to that ingress gateway. When it receives this message, the ingress 
   gateway measures the aggregate-rate of real-time traffic that is 
   being sent towards the particular egress gateway. If this measured 
   aggregate-rate exceeds the Sustainable-Aggregate-Rate, then the 
   ingress gateway pre-empts sufficient number of real-time flow(s) to 
   bring down the aggregate-rate to (approximately) the Sustainable-
   Aggregate-Rate.  

   Different implementations of the rate measurement (and the timescale 
   of this measurement) at the egress and ingress nodes are possible.  

    

    

    

    

    

    





 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 15] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

4. Simulation results 

   We have performed an initial set of simulations of admission control 
   and flow pre-emption mechanisms described in this document and 
   consistent with [CL-ARCH].  

   We investigated the performance of the admission control and flow 
   pre-emption mechanisms with traffic modelling CBR voice, on-off 
   traffic approximating voice with silence compression, and more 
   aggressive on-off traffic with larger packet sizes and peak and mean 
   rates approximating that of video traffic.  

   In summary, both the admission control and flow pre-emption 
   mechanisms worked well for all of these traffic types under the 
   assumptions of [CL-ARCH] (in particular under the assumption that 
   there are many micro-flows between any pair of ingress / egress 
   gateways, which, in turn, translates in the assumption that 
   relatively high speed links are used). Details of the simulation 
   study are given in Appendix B. In the pdf version of this document 
   Appendix B also include graphs of simulation results. It can be found 
   at 
   http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/projects/ipe2eqos/gqs/papers/
   draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.pdf 

   So far the simulations have been run with a sensible estimate of 
   suitable parameters. While a limited amount of work has been done to 
   evaluate sensitivity of the results to the simulation parameters (see 
   Appendix B), investigating further the sensitivity to these 
   parameters is the next step.  

   Due to time constraints, we were able to simulate a single 
   "congestion point" only, i.e. there was a single node where pre-
   congestion notification for admission control and/or pre-emption was 
   triggered. Furthermore, admission control and flow pre-emption 
   simulations were performed independently.  A study of the interaction 
   of admission control and flow pre-emption is also a subject of future 
   work.  

    

    

    

    


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 16] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

5. Encoding the Admission Marked and Pre-emption Marked states 

   In this Section we describe one proposal for how to encode the 
   Admission Marking and Pre-emption Marking states in a packet, i.e. 
   what change to make to which bits of a packet.  

   The encoding scheme uses the two ECN (Explicit Congestion 
   Notification) bits in the IP header. The four ECN codepoints are used 
   as follows: 
    
         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
         bit 6  bit 7          
            0     0         Admission Marking 
            0     1         ECT(1) 
            1     0         ECT(0) 
            1     1         Pre-emption Marking 
          Other DSCPs       Non-PCN-Capable 
    
   Figure 6: Pre-Congestion Notification's use of the ECN Field in IP 

    

   To explain this, we assume that Pre-Congestion Notification is being 
   used in the architecture described in [CL-ARCH]. It is therefore a 
   controlled environment, with all routers in the CL-region upgraded 
   with the PCN capability. Within the CL-region, this encoding meets 
   the requirements of [Floyd] because a router knows a packet is PCN-
   capable if  

   o Its differentiated services codepoint (DSCP) is one configured for 
      PCN marking.  

   When an ingress gateway gets a packet that it has agreed to treat as 
   part of a PCN-capable microflow, then it sets the ECN field to either 
   ECT(0) or ECT(1) as it chooses, and if necessary it sets the DSCP to 
   a PCN-capable Diffserv codepoint. Packets with this DSCP indicate a 
   PCN-capable transport if any of the four ECN codepoints are set. 

   When a router gets a PCN-capable packet, then (if necessary) it re-
   sets the ECN field to '00' to indicate Admission Marking and to '11' 
   to indicate Pre-emption Marking. Packets with Admission Marking may 
   be re-marked to Pre-emption Marking, but not vice-versa. 

   Other frameworks would be very similar. For example, in a framework 
   where Pre-Congestion Notification operates from one end-host to 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 17] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   another, then the sending end-host would set the ECN field to either 
   ECT(0) or ECT(1). 

     

   One advantage of this encoding scheme is that it allows the use of 
   the ECN nonce, thus providing similar protection against a cheater as 
   [RFC3540]. However, if PCN marking is desired on traffic with a pre-
   existing scheduling behaviour (such as EF) a drawback is that a new 
   DSCP will be required to distinguish PCN-capable traffic from traffic 
   that isn't PCN-capable, so that a router can identify which traffic 
   it should PCN mark.  

   Note that although we believe the encoding scheme is reasonable, it 
   is not our final proposal. Alternatives are listed and discussed in 
   Appendix C. We welcome advice and comments as to the most appropriate 
   scheme. 

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 18] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

6. Acknowledgements 

   This work has evolved from several previous independent efforts: 

   o Guaranteed QoS Synthesis [Hovell], which evolved from the 
      Guaranteed Stream Provider developed in the M3I project [GSPa, 
      GSP-TR], which in turn was based on the theoretical work of 
      Gibbens and Kelly [DCAC] 

   o RTECN (Real-Time Explicit Congestion Notification) [RTECN] 

   o RMD (Resource Management in DiffServ) [RMD] and [Westberg] 

    

7. Comments solicited 

   Comments and questions are encouraged and very welcome. They can be 
   sent to the Transport Area Working Group's mailing list, 
   tsvwg@ietf.org, and/or to the authors.  

    

8. Changes from earlier version of the draft  

   The main changes are: 

   From -00 to -01 

   The description of how to use pre-congestion notification marking in 
   a CL-region is now described in [CL-arch]. 

   Only one admission marking algorithm is now described. 

   A pre-emption marking scheme has been added.  

   Various options for encoding the marking are described and discussed 
   in Appendix C. 

   Simulation results are described in Appendix B and summarised in 
   Section 4.  

    

    


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 19] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

9. Appendix A: Explicit Congestion Notification 

   This Appendix provides a brief summary of Explicit Congestion 
   Notification (ECN). 

   [RFC3168] specifies the incorporation of ECN to TCP and IP, including 
   ECN's use of two bits in the IP header. It specifies a method for 
   indicating incipient congestion to end-nodes (e.g. as in RED, Random 
   Early Detection), where the notification is through ECN marking 
   packets rather than dropping them.   

   ECN uses two bits in the IP header of both IPv4 and IPv6 packets: 

            0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7 
         +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 
         |          DS FIELD, DSCP           | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 
    
           DSCP: differentiated services codepoint 
           ECN:  Explicit Congestion Notification 
    
   Figure A.1: The Differentiated Services and ECN Fields in IP. 

   The two bits of the ECN field have four ECN codepoints, '00' to '11': 
         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
           ECT   CE          
            0     0         Not-ECT 
            0     1         ECT(1) 
            1     0         ECT(0) 
            1     1         CE 
    
   Figure A.2: The ECN Field in IP. 

   The not-ECT codepoint '00' indicates a packet that is not using ECN. 

   The CE codepoint '11' is set by a router to indicate congestion to 
   the end nodes. The term 'CE packet' denotes a packet that has the CE 
   codepoint set.   

   The ECN-Capable Transport (ECT) codepoints '10' and '01' (ECT(0) and 
   ECT(1) respectively) are set by the data sender to indicate that the 
   end-points of the transport protocol are ECN-capable. Routers treat 
   the ECT(0) and ECT(1) codepoints as equivalent. Senders are free to 
   use either the ECT(0) or the ECT(1) codepoint to indicate ECT, on a 
   packet-by-packet basis. The use of both the two codepoints for ECT is 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 20] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   motivated primarily by the desire to allow mechanisms for the data 
   sender to verify that network elements are not erasing the CE 
   codepoint, and that data receivers are properly reporting to the 
   sender the receipt of packets with the CE codepoint set. 

   ECN requires support from the transport protocol, in addition to the 
   functionality given by the ECN field in the IP packet header. 
   [RFC3168] addresses the addition of ECN Capability to TCP, specifying 
   three new pieces of functionality: negotiation between the endpoints 
   during connection setup to determine if they are both ECN-capable; an 
   ECN-Echo (ECE) flag in the TCP header so that the data receiver can 
   inform the data sender when a CE packet has been received; and a 
   Congestion Window Reduced (CWR) flag in the TCP header so that the 
   data sender can inform the data receiver that the congestion window 
   has been reduced. 

   The transport layer (e.g. TCP) must respond, in terms of congestion 
   control, to a *single* CE packet as it would to a packet drop.  

   The advantage of setting the CE codepoint as an indication of 
   congestion, instead of relying on packet drops, is that it allows the 
   receiver(s) to receive the packet, thus avoiding the potential for 
   excessive delays due to retransmissions after packet losses.  

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    




 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 21] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

10. Appendix B - Details of simulations 

   This section provides some details on the simulation study reference 
   in Section 4. 

   Note that the pdf version of this document includes graphs of 
   simulation results that aren't in the text version. It can be found 
   at 
   http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/projects/ipe2eqos/gqs/papers/
   draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.pdf   

10.1. Network and signalling model 

   In most simulations, the network is modelled as a single link between 
   an ingress and an egress node, all flows sharing the same link. 
   Figure B.1 shows the modelled network. A is the ingress node and B is 
   the egress node.  

    

         A --- B 

Figure B.1: Simulated Single Link Network. 
 
 
 
                           A  

                            \ 

                          B  - D - F 

                              / 

                           C 

   Figure B.2: Simulated Multi Link Network. 

   A subset of simulations uses a network structured similarly to the 
   network shown on figure B.2. A set of ingresses (A,B,C) connected to 
   an interior node in the network (D) with links of different 
   propagation delay. This node in turn is connected to the egress (F). 
   In this topology, different sets of flows between each ingress and 
   the egress converge on the single link, where pre-congestion 
   notification algorithm is enabled. In our simulations, the network 
   has 100 ingress nodes, each connected to the interior node with a 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 22] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   different propagation delay (1ms to 100ms). The point of congestion 
   is taken to be the link (D-F) connecting the interior node to the 
   egress node. This link is modelled with a 10ms propagation delay. 
   Therefore the range of RTTs is from 22ms to 220ms. 

   The simple network topology was due to a lack of time for the 
   simulations. 

   Our simulations concentrated primarily on the range of capacities of 
   'bottleneck' links with sufficient aggregation - above 10 Mbps for 
   voice and 622 Mbps for "video", up to 1 Gbps. But we also 
   investigated slower 'bottleneck' links down to 512 kbps. 

   In the simulation model, a call request arrives at the ingress and 
   immediately sends a message to the egress. The message arrives at the 
   egress after the propagation time plus link processing time (but no 
   queuing delay). When the egress receives this message, it immediately 
   responds to the ingress with the current Congestion-Level-Estimate. 
   If the Congestion-Level-Estimate is below the specified CLE-
   threshold, the call is admitted, otherwise it is rejected. 

   The life of a call outside the domain described above is not 
   modelled. Propagation delay from source to the ingress and from 
   destination to the egress is assumed negligible and is not modelled. 

     

10.2. Simulated Traffic types 

   Three types of traffic were simulated (CBR voice, on-off traffic 
   approximating voice with silence compression, and on-off traffic with 
   higher peak and mean rates (we termed the latter "video" as the 
   chosen peak and mean rate was similar to that of an mpeg video 
   stream, although no attempt was made to match any other parameters of 
   this traffic to those of a video stream).  The distribution of flow 
   duration was chosen to be exponentially distributed with mean 2min, 
   regardless of the traffic type. In most of the experiments flows 
   arrived according to a Poisson distribution with mean arrival rate 
   chosen to achieve a desired amount of overload over the configured-
   pre-emption-rate or configured-admission-limit in each experiment. 
   Overloads in the range 2x to 5x have been investigated. 

   In addition, some experiments investigated a batch Poisson model. 
   Here the batch represented a set of calls arriving at almost the same 
   time. The batch arrival process was Poisson, and the batch size was 
   geometrically distributed with a mean of up to 5 calls per batch.  

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 23] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   For on-off traffic, on and off periods were exponentially distributed 
   with the specified mean. 

   Traffic parameters for each flow are summarized below:  

10.2.1. Voice CBR 

   * Average rate 64 Kbps,  

   * Packet length 160 bytes 

   * packet inter-arrival time 20ms  

10.2.2. On-off traffic approximating voice with silence compression 

   * Packet length 160 bytes 

   * Long-term average rate 21.76 Kbps 

   * On Period mean duration 340ms; during the on period traffic is sent 
   with the CBR voice parameters described above 

   * Off Period mean duration 660ms; no traffic is sent during the off 
   period. 

10.2.3. High-rate on-off traffic   

   * Long term average rate 4 Mbps 

   * On Period mean duration 340ms; during the on-period the packets are 
   sent at 12 Mbps (1500 byte packets, packet inter-arrival: 1ms) 

   * Off Period mean duration 660ms 

 

10.3. Admission Control Simulations 

10.3.1. Summary of the key parameters for CAC 

10.3.1.1. Virtual Queue settings 

   Most of the simulations were run with the following Virtual Queue 
   thresholds: 

   * min-marking-threshold: 5ms at link speed, 

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 24] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   *  max-marking-threshold: 15ms at link speed,  

   *  virtual-queue-upper-limit: 20ms at link speed.  

   The virtual-queue-upper-limit puts an upper bound on how much the 
   virtual queue can grow.  

   Note that the virtual queue is drained at a configured rate smaller 
   than the link speed. Most of the simulations were set with the 
   configured-admission-rate of the virtual queue at half the link 
   speed. 

   Note that as long as there is no packet loss, the admission control 
   scheme successfully keeps the load of admitted flows at the desired 
   level regardless of the actual setting of the configured-admission-
   limit.  However, it is not clear if this remains true when the 
   configured-admission-rate is close to the link speed/actual queue 
   service rate.  Further work is necessary to quantify the performance 
   of the scheme with smaller service rate/virtual queue rate ratio, 
   where packet loss may be an issue. 

    

10.3.1.2. Egress measurement parameters.  

   In our simulations, the CLE-threshold was chosen as 0.5. The CLE is 
   computed as an exponential weighted moving average (EWMA) with a 
   weight of 0.01. The CLE is computed on a per-packet basis. 

    

10.3.2. Overview of the Admission Control Results 

   We found that on links of capacity from 10Mbps to OC3, congestion 
   control for CBR voice and ON_OFF voice traffic work reliably with the 
   range of parameters we simulated, both with Poisson and Batch call 
   arrivals.  As the performance of the algorithm was quite good at 
   these speeds, and generally becomes the better the higher the degree 
   of aggregation of traffic, we chose to not investigate higher link 
   speeds for CBR and on-off voice, within the time constraints of this 
   effort.  

   For higher-rate on-off "video" traffic, due to time limitations we 
   simulated 1Gbps and OC12 (622 Mbps) links and Poisson arrivals only. 
   Note that due to the high mean and peak rates of this traffic model, 
   slower links are unlikely to yield sufficient level of aggregation of 
   this type of traffic to satisfy the flow aggregation assumptions of 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 25] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   [CL-ARCH]. Our simulations indicated that this model also behaved 
   quite well, although the deviation from the configured-admission-rate 
   is slightly higher in this case than for the less bursty traffic 
   models. 

   For these link speeds and traffic models, we investigated the demand 
   overload of 2x-5x.  

   Table B.1 below summarizes the worst case difference between the 
   admitted load vs. configured-admission-rate. The worst case 
   difference was taken over all experiments with the corresponding 
   range of link speeds and demand overloads. In general, the higher the 
   demand, the more challenging it is for the admission control 
   algorithm due to a larger number of near-simultaneous arrivals at 
   higher overloads, and as a result the worst case results in Table B.1 
   correspond to the 5x demand overload experiments.  

------------------------------------------------------------------ 
|               |         |           | diff between  |          | 
| Link type     | traffic | call      | mean admitted | standard | 
|               | type    | arrival   | load &        | deviation| 
|               |         | process   | conf-adm-rate |          | 
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3 | CBR     | POISSON   |    0.5%       |   0.5%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------------          
|  
|T3,100Mbps,OC3 |ON-OFF V | POISSON   |    2.5%       |   2.5%   |          
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3 | CBR     |  BATCH    |    1.0%       |   1.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3 |ON-OFF V |  BATCH    |    3.0%       |   3.0%   |           
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
|  1Gbps        | "Video" |  POISSON  |    2.0%       |   8.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
|  OC12        |"Video   |  POISSON  |    0.0%       |  10.0%    |        
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Table B.1. Summary of the admission control results for links above T3 
speeds 
Note: T1 = 1.5Mbps, T3 = 45Mbps, OC3 = 155Mbps, OC12 = 622Mbps 
 
   Sample simulation graphs for the experiments summarized in Table 6.1  
   can be viewed in the PDF version of this draft. It can be found at 


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 26] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/projects/ipe2eqos/gqs/papers/
   draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.pdf 

   On slower links, accuracy of admission control algorithm was lower 
   with Poisson arrivals, and was especially challenging with burstier 
   Batch arrivals. This is described in section 6.3.3 below.  

   In general, we find that the admission control algorithm perform the 
   better the larger degree of aggregation of traffic on the link. The 
   algorithm performs well in the range of link speeds we expect to see 
   in a CL region.  

    

10.3.3. Sensitivity to Poisson Arrivals assumption 

   We investigated whether making the call arrival process burstier than 
   Poisson has an effect on the performance of the admission control 
   algorithm. To that end we investigated the comparative performance of 
   the algorithm with Poisson and Batch call arrival processes, 
   described in section 10.2. The mean call arrival rate was the same 
   for both processes, with the demand overloads ranging from 2x to 5x. 

   We found that the admission control algorithm works reliably for both 
   CBR and VBR at links of 1Mbps and above for up to 5x overloads for 
   both Poisson and Batch call arrivals. We also found that the 
   admission control algorithm only works reasonably well at links of 1 
   Mb/s if we assume CBR traffic and Poisson arrival. At T1 speeds and 
   below, Batch arrivals resulted in over-admission, the degree of which 
   increased on slower links. 

   Table B.2 below summarizes the difference between the admitted load 
   and the configured-admission-rate for CBR Voice in the case of 
   Poisson and Batch arrivals. Table B.3 provides a similar summary for 
   on-off traffic simulating voice with silence compression. The results 
   in the tables correspond to the worst case across all overload 
   factors (and when multiple links speeds are listed, across all those 
   link speeds). 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 27] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

------------------------------------------------------------- 
|              |             | diff between  |              | 
| Link type    |  arrival    | mean admitted | standard     | 
|              |  model      | load &        | deviation    | 
|              |             | conf-adm-rate |              | 
------------------------------------------------------------ 
| 1Mbps, T1    |    BATCH    |      30.0%    |      30.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  10 Mbps     |    BATCH    |       5.0%    |       8.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3|    BATCH    |       1.0%    |       1.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  1Mbps, T1   |  POISSON    |       5.0%    |      10.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
| 10 Mbps      |  POISSON    |       1.0%    |       2.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3|  POISSON    |       0.5%    |       0.5%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
Table B.2. Comparison of Poisson and Batch call arrival models for CBR 
voice.   Note: T1 = 1.5Mbps, T3 = 45Mbps, OC3 = 155Mbps, OC12 = 622Mbps 
------------------------------------------------------------ 
|              |             | diff between  |              | 
| Link type    |  arrival    | mean admitted | standard     | 
|              |  model      | load &        | deviation    | 
|              |             | conf-adm-rate |              | 
------------------------------------------------------------ 
| 1Mbps, T1    |    BATCH    |      40.0%    |      30.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  10 Mbps     |    BATCH    |       8.0%    |       6.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3|   BATCH     |       3.0%    |       3.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  1Mbps, T1   |  POISSON    |      15.0%    |      20.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
| 10 Mbps      |  POISSON    |       7.0%    |       6.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|T3,100Mbps,OC3|  POISSON    |       2.5%    |       2.5%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
Table B.3. Comparison of Poisson and Batch call arrival models for on-
off voice with silence compression. 
Note: T1 = 1.5Mbps, T3 = 45Mbps, OC3 = 155Mbps, OC12 = 622Mbps  
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 28] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

 
10.3.4. Sensitivity to marking parameters 

   The behaviour of the congestion control algorithm in all simulation 
   experiments did not substantially differ depending on whether the 
   marking was "ramp", i.e. whether a separate min-marking-threshold and 
   max-marking-threshold were used, with linear marking probability 
   between these thresholds, or whether the marking was "step" with the 
   min-marking-threshold and max-marking-threshold collapsed at the max-
   marking-threshold value, and marking all packets with probability 1 
   above this collapsed threshold.  

   However, the difference between "ramp" and "step" may be more visible 
   in the multiple congestion point case (recall that only a single 
   congestion point experiments were performed so far).   

   Another possible reason for this apparent lack of difference between 
   "ramp" and "step" may relate to the choice of the egress measurement 
   parameters and a relatively high CLE threshold of 50%. Choosing a 
   lower CLE-acceptance threshold and a faster measurement timescale may 
   result in a better sensitivity to lower levels of marked traffic.  
   Investigating the interaction between settings of the marking 
   thresholds, the CLE-threshold, and the measurement parameters at the 
   egress is an area of future investigation.  

   In contrast, the limited number of simulation experiments we 
   performed indicate that the choice of the absolute value of the min-
   marking-threshold, the max-marking-threshold and the virtual-queue-
   upper-limit can have an effect on the algorithm performance. 
   Specifically, choosing the min-marking-threshold and the max-marking-
   threshold too small may cause substantial underutilization, 
   especially on the slow links. However, at larger values of the min-
   marking-threshold and the max-marking-threshold, preliminary 
   experiments suggest the algorithm's performance is insensitive to 
   their values. The choice of the virtual-queue-upper-limit affects the 
   amount of over-admission (above the configured-admission-rate 
   threshold) in some cases, although this effect is not consistent 
   throughout the experiments.  

   The Table B.4 below gives a summary of the difference between the 
   admitted load and the configured-admission-rate as a function of the 
   virtual queue parameters, for the 4 Mbps on-off traffic model.  The 
   results in the table represent the worst case result among the 
   experiments with different degree of demand overloads in the range of 
   2x-5x. Typically, higher deviation of admitted load from the 


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 29] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   configured-admission-rate occurs for the higher degree of demand 
   overload. 

    

------------------------------------------------------------- 
|            |               | diff between  |              | 
| Link type  |min-threshold, | mean admitted | standard     | 
|            |max-threshold, | load &        | deviation    | 
|            |upper-limit(ms)| conf-adm-rate |              | 
------------------------------------------------------------ 
|  1Gbps     |5, 15, 20      |       6.0%    |       8.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  1Gbps     |1, 5, 10       |       2.0%    |       7.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  1Gbps     |5, 15, 45      |       2.0%    |       8.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  OC12      |5, 15, 20      |       5.0%    |      11.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  OC12      |1, 5, 10       |       2.0%    |      13.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
|  OC12      |5, 15, 45      |       0.0%    |      10.0%   | 
------------------------------------------------------------- 
Table B.4. Sensitivity of 4 Mbps on-off "video" traffic to the virtual 
queue settings. 
Note: T1 = 1.5Mbps, T3 = 45Mbps, OC3 = 155Mbps, OC12 = 622Mbps 
 
   Impact of the virtual queue parameter setting is a subject of further 
   study.  

    

10.3.5. Sensitivity to RTT 

   We performed a limited amount of sensitivity of the admission control 
   algorithm used to the range of round trip propagation time (which is 
   the dominant component of the control delay in the typical 
   environment using pre-congestion notification).  

   Specifically, we studied the case when different groups of flows 
   sharing a single bottleneck link in the network have a range of 
   roundtrip delays between 22 and 220 ms, as shown in Figure B.2. 


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 30] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   The results were good for all types of traffic tested, implying that 
   the admission control algorithm is not sensitive to the either the 
   absolute value of the round-trip propagation time or relative value 
   of the round-trip propagation time, at least in the range of values 
   tested. We expect this to remain true for a wider range of round-trip 
   propagation times.   

    

10.3.6. Future Work for Admission Control Experiments 

   Areas of future investigation include extending the study of 
   sensitivity to multiple congestion points and topologies, further 
   investigation of sensitivity to factors such as marking parameters, 
   implementation details and time scale of egress measurements, the 
   CLE-threshold. Also variations on the marking algorithm will be 
   studied. 

   Another area of investigation is to understand the sensitivity to the 
   ratio of configured-admission-rate to the actual queue service 
   rate/link speed, and specifically study how close the configured-
   admission-rate can be to the actual queue draining rate. A related 
   investigation is to understand the effect of packet loss on the 
   admission control mechanisms. Packet loss can occur if the 
   configured-admission-rate is sufficiently close to the actual queue 
   rate.  

   More realistic Video modelling and the mix of video and voice traffic 
   in the same queue is also an area of further study. 

10.4. Flow Pre-emption Simulations 

10.4.1. Flow Pre-emption Model and key parameters 

   The same single-congestion-point network model as described in 
   section 10.1 for admission control is used for flow pre-emption. Flow 
   arrival and traffic models are also the same as for CAC admission 
   control simulations. 

   In all flow pre-emption simulations, flows arrive at the ingress 
   according to a Poisson distribution, with the mean load of 
   "unrestricted" arrivals exceeding the pre-emption threshold by a 
   factor of 2 to 5. However, as explained below, the pre-emption 
   simulation involve a very sudden surge of traffic to simulate a 
   network failure scenario. 


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 31] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   In the simulation, the router implementing PCN Pre-emption Marking 
   operates as described in section 3, marking packets which find no 
   token in the token bucket. When an egress gateway receives a marked 
   packet from the ingress, it will start measuring its Sustainable-
   Aggregate-Rate for this ingress, if it is not already in the pre-
   emption mode.  

   If a marked packet arrives while the egress is already in the pre-
   emption mode, the packet is ignored. 

   The measurement is interval based, with 100ms measurement interval 
   chosen in all simulations.  

   At the end of the measurement interval, the egress sends the measured 
   Sustainable-Aggregate-Rate to the ingress, and leaves the pre-emption 
   mode. 

   When the ingress receives the sustainable rate from the egress, it 
   starts its own interval immediately (unless it is already in a 
   measurement interval), and measures its sending rate to that egress. 
   Then at the end of that measurement interval, it pre-empts the 
   necessary amount of traffic. The ingress then leaves the pre-emption 
   mode until the next time it receives the sustainable rate estimate 
   from the egress. 

   Due to time limitations, in all our simulations the ingress used the 
   same length of the measurement interval as the egress. Investigation 
   of the impact of different measurement intervals is an important area 
   of future work. 

   To avoid excessive pre-emption due to the rate measurement errors, we 
   used two error factors, Error1 and Error2 to trigger decisions on 
   when to pre-empt and how much to pre-empt at the ingress. To that 
   end, the ingress did not trigger pre-emption unless the sending rate 
   it measured was greater than SAR + Error1 (SAR=Sustainable Aggregate 
   Rate). Similarly, the ingress pre-empted enough flows to reduce its 
   sending rate to SAR - Error2. Both Error1 and Error2 in all 
   simulations were in the range of 2-5%. 

   The configured-pre-emption-rate was set to 50% of link speed. Token 
   bucket depth was set to 64 packets for CBR and 128 packets for on-off 
   traffic. 

   We only tested on the network shown in Figure B.1 and we experimented 
   with different propagation delay values: 10ms, 50ms and 100ms.  


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 32] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   Due to time limitation, only links above T3 rate were simulated in 
   Pre-emption experiments. 

   In all pre-emption experiments, we simulated the base load of traffic 
   below pre-emption threshold. At some point during the experiment, the 
   load was suddenly increased to simulate sudden overload such that 
   might occur after a link failure causes rerouting of some traffic to 
   a previously un-congested link. In order to model the fact that a 
   link failure may cause flows rerouting to a particular link over a 
   period of time, we simulated a "one-wave" traffic surge, where the 
   extra flows arrived near simultaneously, and a "three-wave" traffic 
   surge, where there are two surges of traffic arriving close together 
   (within one measurement interval), followed by a third surge at a 
   later time. 

10.4.2. Summary of Flow Pre-emption Experiments. 

   Our initial simulations demonstrated that in general performance of 
   the flow pre-emption mechanism was good, and the appropriate amount 
   of traffic was pre-empted in all simulated cases, as long as the 
   depth of the pre-emption token bucket was set appropriately (64 
   packets for CBR, 128 or higher for on-off traffic). The pre-emption 
   always occurred very fast (in particular, in the simulation graphs 
   shown in the pdf version of this document with time granularity of 1 
   second, pre-emption looks instantaneous). 

   Perhaps the most useful result of the simulation experiments we were 
   able to run so far was the importance of choosing the token bucket 
   depth deep enough to accommodate the expected burstiness on CL 
   traffic. If the token bucket depth is too small, instantaneous bursts 
   may cause false pre-emption events. Note that if traffic load is 
   stable or decreasing, then marking some packets erroneously during a 
   an unexpected short burst does not cause any false pre-emption, 
   because the rate measurement of the sustained rate is not affected by 
   a small amount of pre-emption-marked packets.  However, if the 
   traffic load is increasing (while still remaining below pre-emption 
   level on the average), a packet marked for pre-emption because it 
   found no tokens in the too-shallow token bucket, may cause a false 
   pre-emption event.  

10.4.3. Future Work on Flow Pre-emption Experiments 

   Further work is required to study potential ways of reducing 
   sensitivity of the algorithm to the token bucket depth. Potential 
   approaches may be to smooth out pre-emption signal by requiring a 
   certain amount of pre-emption-marked packets to arrive to the egress 
   before measurement of the sustainable rate is triggered. An obvious 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 33] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   trade-off to be quantified is the corresponding increase in the 
   reaction time to receiving a pre-emption-marked packet.  

   Further quantification of the sensitivity to traffic burstiness and 
   rate measurement implementation and time scales is an important area 
   for future work.  

   More realistic Video modelling and the mix of video and voice traffic 
   in the same queue is also an area of further study. 

   Another area of further investigation is the interaction of flow pre-
   emption and admission control, and specifically understanding of how 
   close the admission and pre-emption rates can be on one link. A 
   related topic is the interaction of flow pre-emption and admission 
   control triggered by different links for the same ingress-egress 
   pair.  

   The exact algorithm for selecting which flows to pre-empt in the case 
   of variable rate flows and mixture of traffic profile is subject of 
   further study.  

   Representative graphs for pre-emption experiments are presented in 
   the PDF version of this draft. It can be found at 
   http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/projects/ipe2eqos/gqs/papers/
   draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-01.pdf 

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    




 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 34] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

11. Appendix C - Alternative ways of encoding the Admission Marked and 
   Pre-emption Marked States 

   In this Appendix we list and discuss alternative ways of encoding the 
   Admission Marked and Pre-emption Marked states. We ignore minor 
   variants such as swapping the encoding for the Admission Marked and 
   Pre-emption Marked states.  

    

11.1. Alternative 1  

   The first alternative is the one given in Section 5 above. 

         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
         bit 6  bit 7          
            0     0         Admission Marking 
            0     1         ECT(1) 
            1     0         ECT(0) 
            1     1         Pre-emption Marking 
    
         Other DSCPs        Not ECN capable 
    
   Figure C.1: Encoding scheme Alternative 1 

    

11.2. Alternative 2  

   In the second alternative, both Admission Marking and Pre-emption 
   Marking are encoded as '11', depending on the original ECT marking: 

   o Setting the ECN field of an ECT(1) packet to '11' indicates 
      Admission Marking  

   o Setting the ECN field of an ECT(0) packet to '11' indicates Pre-
      emption Marking  







 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 35] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
         bit 6  bit 7          
            0     0         Not-ECT 
            0     1         ECT(1/A)  re-mark ECT(1) to '11' to encode 
                                      Admission Marking                         
            1     0         ECT(0/P)  re-mark ECT(0) to '11' to encode 
                                      Pre-emption Marking 
            1     1         Admission Marking or Pre-emption Marking 
    
   Figure C.2: Encoding scheme Alternative 2 

    

11.3. Alternative 3  

   The third alternative is a combination of the previous two schemes.  

         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
         bit 6  bit 7          
            0     0         Admission Marking 
            0     1         ECT(1/A)  re-mark ECT(1) to '00' to encode 
                                      Admission Marking                         
            1     0         ECT(0/P)  re-mark ECT(0) to '11' to encode 
                                      Pre-emption Marking 
            1     1         Pre-emption Marking 
    
         Other DSCPs        Not ECN capable 
    
   Figure C.3: Encoding scheme Alternative 3 

    

11.4. Alternative 4  

   In the fourth alternative a packet is re-marked with a new DSCP to 
   indicate Pre-emption Marking.  






 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 36] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
         bit 6  bit 7          
            0     0         Not ECN capable 
            0     1         ECT(1)     
            1     0         ECT(0)     
            1     1         Admission Marking  
    
            New DSCP        Pre-emption Marking 
    
   Figure C.4: Encoding scheme Alternative 4 

    

11.5. Alternative 5  

   The fifth alternative doesn't include the ECN nonce.  

         +-----+-----+ 
         | ECN FIELD | 
         +-----+-----+ 
         bit 6  bit 7          
            0     0         Not ECN capable 
            0     1         PCN capable 
            1     0         Admission Marking     
            1     1         Pre-emption Marking 
    
   Figure C.5: Encoding scheme Alternative 5 

    

11.6. Comparison of Alternatives 

   In this section we compare the encoding alternatives against various 
   criteria. No scheme is perfect. We would like feedback and advice 
   from the IETF community as to which is most suitable. The choice of 
   how to encode the markings is non-trivial because we have five things 
   we want to encode, and only have four states available in the two 
   bits of the ECN field: 

   o Admission Marking - the traffic level is such that the router 
      Admission Marks the packet  

   o Pre-emption Marking - the traffic level is such that the router 
      Pre-emption Marks the packet 

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 37] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   o ECT(0) - the first ECT codepoint, for backwards compatibility with 
      the ECN nonce 

   o ECT(1) - the other ECT codepoint, for backwards compatibility with 
      the ECN nonce 

   o Not ECN - to indicate to a router that the traffic is not ECN-
      capable, and indeed not PCN-capable.  

    

   Some of the issues won't be relevant in particular scenarios. For 
   example, with the CL-region framework[CL-ARCH], the edge-to-edge 
   region is a controlled environment so an ECN (RFC3168) packet should 
   never encounter a PCN-enabled router. 

   Occasionally we use the terminology of the CL-region framework. This 
   is merely to make the language more specific.  

    

11.6.1. How compatible is the encoding scheme with RFC 3168 ECN? 

   All the encoding schemes for Pre-Congestion Notification use the ECN 
   field, so there will be interactions between PCN and ECN. Three 
   aspects are: 

   o What happens if an ECN (RFC3168) packet encounters a PCN-enabled 
      router? 

   o What happens if a PCN-capable packet encounters an ECN-enabled 
      router? 

   o What happens if a flow that has been admitted, using the PCN-based 
      admission control mechanism, wants to use ECN (i.e. from end-point 
      to end-point as in RFC3168)? 

   The first two bullets are about an "unusual" situation, perhaps where 
   re-routing means that a PCN-enabled packet gets routed onto an ECN 
   router - or perhaps where one of the CL-regions ingress gateways is 
   misconfigured so that it allows in ECN packets into the CL traffic 
   class. The third bullet is when the end-point wants its flow, which 
   has been reserved using PCN-based admission control, to also use ECN-
   congestion control. There has been some discussion (and disagreement) 
   about whether this is a realistic requirement [Floyd] [tsvwg-ml].  

    
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 38] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   o What happens if an ECN (RFC3168) packet encounters a PCN-enabled 
      router? 

   The main issue here is if traffic at the PCN-router is above the 
   admission or pre-emption threshold, and what then happens when the 
   ECN packet reaches the RFC3168 ECN end-point. 

   Alternative 2 and 4 are very safe. If the PCN-router Admission Marks 
   a packet ('11'), the ECN end-point interprets this as the CE 
   codepoint. The admission threshold is lower (perhaps much lower) than 
   an ECN threshold would be. 

   Alternative 3 is also safe. If the PCN-router Pre-emption Marks a 
   packet ('11'), the ECN end-point interprets this as the CE codepoint. 
   The pre-emption threshold is likely to be lower than an ECN threshold 
   would be, and is definitely lower than the traffic level at which 
   packets would start to be dropped. 

   Alternative 5 is probably OK. However if the level of RFC3168 traffic 
   is above the PCN router's configured-admission-rate but below its 
   configured-pre-emption-rate, then packets are admission marked (to 
   '10') but not pre-emption marked (to '11'). Therefore the ECN traffic 
   would tend to block new PCN flows, but not reduce its own rate. This 
   would be safer with the encodings for admission marking and pre-
   emption marking swapped.  

   With Alternatives 1 and 3, if traffic is above the admission 
   threshold then packets will be re-marked to '00'. A subsequent ECN 
   router will therefore think the packet isn't ECN-capable.  

   With Alternative 5 packets are admission marked to '10', which could 
   confuse an ECN RFC3168 end-point using the ECN nonce.  

    

   o What happens if a PCN-capable packet encounters an ECN-enabled 
      router? 

   The main issue is if the ECN-router is becoming congested, so it 
   changes the ECN field to '11', to indicate Congestion Experienced 
   (CE).  

   With Alternatives 1, 3 and 5 '11' will be interpreted as Pre-emption 
   Marking, so the pre-emption mechanism will be triggered.  



 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 39] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   With Alternative 2 either the pre-emption or admission mechanism 
   would be triggered (depending whether it was originally a '10' or 
   '01' packet). 

   With Alternative 4 the admission control mechanism will be triggered. 

   Interpretation of '11' as pre-emption marking is probably safer than 
   interpreting it as admission marking, because it then pre-empts flows 
   going through a congested ECN router. However, it isn't clear-cut 
   what 'safe' means in this context.  

    

   o What happens if a flow that has been admitted, using the PCN-based 
      admission control mechanism, wants to use ECN (i.e. from end-point 
      to end-point as in RFC3168)? 

   For instance with the CL-region framework, it isn't clear what the 
   ingress gateway should do if it gets a packet with the CE codepoint, 
   '11'. All the PCN encoding schemes have the same issue. Some options: 

   - the ingress gateway could re-set a '11' packet to one of the ECT 
      codepoints. However, as far as the ECN-end-point is concerned, the 
      CE information is lost. 

   - The ingress gateway could pre-empt the flow. This is safer, but 
      perhaps harsh as the flow would now be handled by the non-PCN-
      capable class within the CL-region, and by the non-ECN-capable 
      class after that. 

   - Tunnelling between the ingress and egress gateways, e.g. all PCN-
      capable traffic could be tunnelled. This preserves both the ECN 
      and PCN functionality, but at the cost of the tunnelling.  

    

11.6.2. Does the encoding scheme allow an "ECN-nonce"? 

   The Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)-nonce is an optional 
   addition to ECN that protects against accidental or malicious 
   concealment of marked packets from the TCP sender. It uses the two 
   ECN-Capable Transport (ECT) codepoints in the ECN field of the IP 
   header. It improves the robustness of congestion control by enabling 
   co-operative senders to prevent receivers from exploiting ECN to gain 
   an unfair share of network bandwidth.  


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 40] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   Pre-Congestion Notification is targeted at real-time traffic, which 
   we'd expect to use UDP or DCCP rather than TCP. However, we imagine 
   an "ECN-nonce" could be defined for DCCP and perhaps UDP with similar 
   functionality to the ECN-nonce.  

   Analysing the encoding schemes in the context of an ECN-nonce: 

   o Alternatives 2 and 4 would allow an ECN-nonce 

   o Alternatives 1 and 3 would party allow an ECN-nonce - in terms of 
      the edge-to-edge framework, an egress gateway would be able to 
      detect a cheating ingress gateway, but it wouldn't detect an 
      interior router re-marking the ECN field from '11' to '00'.   

   o Alternative 5 wouldn't allow an ECN-nonce 

   An alternative scheme intended to prevent cheating when using ECN for 
   admission control is proposed in [Re-PCN]. This scheme claims to 
   provide protection against a much wider range of cheating strategies 
   than the ECN-Nonce, including against cheating ingress nodes or 
   senders. Whereas the ECN-nonce requires the sender to be trusted. 
   This scheme uses a bit outside the ECN field, so Alternative 5 
   combined with that scheme could solve the problem of fitting five 
   states into four codepoints.  

11.6.3. Does the encoding scheme require new DSCP(s)? 

   o Alternatives 2 and 5 do not. 

   o Alternative 1 does not allow indication of a non-PCN-capable 
      transport within the same DSCP as used by PCN-capable transports. 
      Therefore, if the PCN-routers are used with a pre-existing 
      scheduling behaviour (such as EF) an extra DSCP would have to be 
      used to indicate the combination of PCN marking with EF 
      scheduling.   

   o Alternative 4 needs a new DSCP so a PCN-router can Pre-emption 
      Mark a packet.  

   In Section 5 we suggested that the Expedited Forwarding DSCP might be 
   used to indicate to a PCN-router that a packet is part of a PCN-
   capable flow. However PCN could be used similarly to add admission 
   control and flow pre-emption to other DSCP classes. With Alternative 
   4 a new DSCP would be needed for each PCN-enabled class.  

   It's not clear to what extent the requirement for extra DSCP(s) 
   matters. DSCPs are plentiful in an IP network, but scarce in an MPLS 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 41] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   network where the DSCP/ECN byte is mapped to the three MPLS header 
   EXP bits [MPLS/EXP]. However, note that there is at least no need to 
   encode the ECN-nonce in the MPLS EXP field, as it is sufficient to 
   encode the ECN-nonce in the underlying IP header. 

    

11.6.4. Impact on measurements 

   With some of the Alternatives, the measurements by the egress gateway 
   for instance, have to be modified: 

   With Alternative 2 and 3, it has to measure the rate of ECT(1/A) in 
   order to deduce the total number of bits in admission marked packets. 

   With Alternative 2, the egress moves into the pre-emption alert state 
   if the rate of ECT(0/P) is significantly less than 50%. This is 
   slower than the other Alternatives which are triggered by a single 
   pre-emption marked packet. It also makes it more likely that the 
   egress moves into the pre-emption alert state when the traffic level 
   actually doesn't justify this.  

   With Alternative 4 the egress has to monitor the new DSCP in order to 
   measure pre-emption marked packets.  

11.6.5. Other issues 

   With Alternatives 2 and 3, Admission Marking means re-marking the ECN 
   field of a '01' packet and Pre-emption Marking means re-marking a 
   '10' packet. Therefore extra work is required compared with the other 
   Alternatives; exactly what the work is depends on the details of the 
   framework using PCN. 

   With Alternatives 1 and 5 Pre-emption Marking overwrites Admission 
   Marking. 

   With Alternative 4 Pre-emption Marking is indicated by a new DSCP. 
   Some ECMP (Equal Cost Multipath Routing) algorithms use the DSCP 
   field as one of the input fields used to calculate which link to 
   forward a packet on. Therefore, with a network running ECMP there is 
   a danger that a Pre-emption Marked packet might be forwarded on a 
   different path to other PCN-capable packets. The extent that this 
   matters is for further study. It is not an issue for the other 
   encoding Alternatives.  

 

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 42] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

12. References 

   A later version will distinguish normative and informative 
   references.  

   [CL-arch]     B. Briscoe, P. Eardley, D. Songhurst, F. Le Faucheur, 
                 A.   Charny, S. Dudley, J. Babiarz, K. Chan. A 
                 Framework for Admission Control over DiffServ using 
                 Pre-Congestion Notification, draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-
                 architecture-02.txt", (work in progress), March 2006 

   [DCAC]        Richard J. Gibbens and Frank P. Kelly "Distributed 
                 connection acceptance control for a connectionless 
                 network", In: Proc. International Teletraffic Congress 
                 (ITC16), Edinburgh, pp. 941—952 (1999). 

   [Floyd]       S. Floyd, 'Specifying Alternate Semantics for the 
                 Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Field', draft-
                 floyd-ecn-alternates-00.txt (work in progress), April 
                 2005  

   [GSPa]        Karsten (Ed.), Martin "GSP/ECN Technology \& 
                 Experiments", Deliverable: 15.3 PtIII, M3I Eu Vth 
                 Framework Project IST-1999-11429, URL: 
                 http://www.m3i.org/ (February, 2002) (superseded by 
                 [GSP- TR]) 

   [GSP-TR]      Martin Karsten and Jens Schmitt, "Admission Control 
                 Based on Packet Marking and Feedback Signalling ­-- 
                 Mechanisms, Implementation and Experiments", TU-
                 Darmstadt Technical Report TR-KOM-2002-03, URL: 
                 http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-
                 darmstadt.de/publications/abstracts/KS02-5.html (May, 
                 2002)  

   [Hovell]      P. Hovell, R. Briscoe, G. Corliano, "Guaranteed QoS 
                 Synthesis - an example of a scalable core IP quality 
                 of service solution", BT Technology Journal, Vol 23 No 
                 2, April 2005 

   [Re-PCN]      B. Briscoe, "Emulating Border Flow Policing using Re-
                 ECN on Bulk Data", draft-briscoe-tsvwg-re-ecn-border-
                 cheat-00 (work in progress), February 2006                

   [RFC2119]     Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate 
                 Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.  

 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 43] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   [RFC2211]     J. Wroclawski, Specification of the Controlled-Load 
                 Network Element Service, September 1997 

   [RFC2474]     Nichols, K., Blake, S., Baker, F. and D. Black, 
                 "Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS 
                 Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers", RFC 2474, 
                 December 1998 

   [RFC2475]     Blake, S., Black, D., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, 
                 Z. and W. Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated 
                 Services", RFC 2475, December 1998. 

   [RFC2597]     Heinanen, J., Baker, F., Weiss, W. and J. Wrocklawski, 
                 "Assured Forwarding PHB Group", RFC 2597, June 1999. 

   [RFC3168]     Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S. and D. Black "The Addition 
                 of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP", RFC 
                 3168, September 2001. 

   [RFC3246]     B. Davie, A. Charny, J.C.R. Bennet, K. Benson, J.Y. Le 
                 Boudec, W. Courtney, S. Davari, V. Firoiu, D. 
                 Stiliadis, 'An Expedited Forwarding PHB (Per-Hop 
                 Behavior)', RFC 3246, March 2002. 

   [RFC3540]     N. Spring, D. Wetherall, D. Ely, 'Robust Explicit 
                 Congestion Notification (ECN) Signaling with Nonces', 
                 RFC 3540, June 2003. 

   [RMD]         A Bader, L Westberg, G Karagiannis, C Kappler, T 
                 Phelan, 'RMD-QOSM - The Resource Management in 
                 DiffServ QoS model', draft-ietf-nsis-rmd-06 Work in 
                 Progress, February 2006 

   [RTECN]       Babiarz, J., Chan, K. and V. Firoiu, 'Congestion 
                 Notification Process for Real-Time Traffic', draft-
                 babiarz-tsvwg-rtecn-05 Work in Progress, October 2005. 

   [tsvwg-ml]    Discussion on the TSVWG mailing list, Nov/Dec 2005. 

   [Westberg]    L. Westberg, Z. R. Turanyi, D. Partain, A. Bader, G. 
                 Karagiannis, "Load Control of Real-Time Traffic", 
                 draft-westberg-loadcntr-04.txt (Work in progress), Dec 
                 2005 

    


 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 44] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

Authors' Addresses  

   Bob Briscoe 
   BT Research 
   B54/77, Sirius House 
   Adastral Park 
   Martlesham Heath 
   Ipswich, Suffolk 
   IP5 3RE 
   United Kingdom 
   Email: bob.briscoe@bt.com  
    
   Dave Songhurst 
   BT Research 
   B54/69, Sirius House 
   Adastral Park 
   Martlesham Heath 
   Ipswich, Suffolk 
   IP5 3RE 
   United Kingdom 
   Email: dsonghurst@jungle.bt.co.uk 
                          
   Philip Eardley 
   BT Research 
   B54/77, Sirius House 
   Adastral Park 
   Martlesham Heath 
   Ipswich, Suffolk 
   IP5 3RE 
   United Kingdom 
   Email: philip.eardley@bt.com 
                        
   Vassilis Liatsos 
   Cisco Systems, Inc. 
   1414 Massachusetts Avenue 
   Boxborough, 
   MA 01719, 
   USA 
   Email: vliatsos@ciscoyahoo.com 
    
   Francois Le Faucheur  
   Cisco Systems, Inc.  
   Village d'Entreprise Green Side - Batiment T3  
   400, Avenue de Roumanille  
   06410 Biot Sophia-Antipolis  
   France                    
   Email: flefauch@cisco.com  
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 45] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

    
   Anna Charny 
   Cisco Systems, Inc. 
   14164 Massachusetts Ave 
   Boxborough, 
   MA 01719 
   USA 
   Email: acharny@cisco.com 
    
   Jozef Babiarz 
   Nortel Networks 
   3500 Carling Avenue 
   Ottawa, Ont.  K2H 8E9 
   Canada 
   Email: babiarz@nortel.com 
    
   Kwok Ho Chan 
   Nortel Networks 
   600 Technology Park Drive 
   Billerica, MA 01821 
   USA 
   Email: khchan@nortel.com 
    
   Stephen Dudley 
   Nortel Networks 
   4001 E. Chapel Hill Nelson Highway 
   P.O. Box 13010, ms 570-01-0V8 
   Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 
   USA 
   Email: smdudley@nortel.com 
    
    

Intellectual Property Statement 

   The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any 
   Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to 
   pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in 
   this document or the extent to which any license under such rights 
   might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has 
   made any independent effort to identify any such rights.  Information 
   on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be 
   found in BCP 78 and BCP 79. 

   Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any 
   assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an 
   attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of 
 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 46] 

Internet-Draft   Pre-Congestion Notification marking        March 2006 
    

   such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this 
   specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at 
   http://www.ietf.org/ipr. 

   The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any 
   copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary 
   rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement 
   this standard.  Please address the information to the IETF at 
   ietf-ipr@ietf.org 

Disclaimer of Validity 

   This document and the information contained herein are provided on an 
   "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS 
   OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET 
   ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, 
   INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE 
   INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED 
   WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 

Copyright Statement 

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). 

   This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions 
   contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors 
   retain all their rights. 

     

















 
 
Briscoe               Expires 6 September 2006               [Page 47] 


PAFTECH AB 2003-20262026-04-22 05:59:27