One document matched: draft-ietf-conex-concepts-uses-01.xml
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<front>
<title abbrev="ConEx Mechanism">ConEx Concepts and Use Cases</title>
<author initials="T." surname="Moncaster" fullname="Toby Moncaster" role="editor">
<organization>Moncaster Internet Consulting</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>Dukes</street>
<street>Layer Marney</street>
<city>Colchester</city>
<code>CO5 9UZ</code>
<country>UK</country>
</postal>
<email>toby@moncaster.com</email>
</address>
</author>
<author initials="J." surname="Leslie" fullname="John Leslie" role="editor">
<organization>JLC.net</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>10 Souhegan Street</street>
<city> Milford</city>
<code>03055</code>
<region>NH</region>
<country>US</country>
</postal>
<email>john@jlc.net</email>
</address>
</author>
<author fullname="Bob Briscoe" initials="B." surname="Briscoe">
<organization>BT</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>B54/77, Adastral Park</street>
<street>Martlesham Heath</street>
<city>Ipswich</city>
<code>IP5 3RE</code>
<country>UK</country>
</postal>
<phone>+44 1473 645196</phone>
<email>bob.briscoe@bt.com</email>
<uri>http://bobbriscoe.net/</uri>
</address>
</author>
<author initials="R." surname="Woundy" fullname="Richard Woundy">
<organization>Comcast</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>Comcast Cable Communications</street>
<street>27 Industrial Avenue</street>
<city> Chelmsford</city>
<code>01824</code>
<region>MA</region>
<country>US</country>
</postal>
<email>richard_woundy@cable.comcast.com</email>
<uri>http://www.comcast.com</uri>
</address>
</author>
<author initials="D." surname="McDysan" fullname="Dave McDysan">
<organization>Verizon</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>22001 Loudon County Pkwy</street>
<city> Ashburn</city>
<code>20147</code>
<region>VA</region>
<country>US</country>
</postal>
<email>dave.mcdysan@verizon.com</email>
</address>
</author>
Dave McDysan
Verizon
22001 Loudoun County PKWY
Ashburn, VA 20147
Email: dave.mcdysan@verizon.com
<date day="14" month="March" year="2011"/>
<area>Transport Area</area>
<workgroup>CONEX</workgroup>
<keyword>Internet-Draft</keyword>
<abstract>
<t> Internet Service Providers (operators) are facing problems where localized congestion
prevents full utilization of the path between sender and receiver at today's
"broadband" speeds. Operators desire to control this congestion, which often appears
to be caused by a small number of users consuming a large amount of bandwidth.
Building out more capacity along all of the path to handle this congestion can
be expensive and may not result in improvements for all users so
network operators have sought other ways to manage congestion.
The current mechanisms all suffer from difficulty measuring the congestion (as
distinguished from the total traffic). </t>
<t> The ConEx Working Group is designing a mechanism to make congestion along any
path visible at the Internet Layer. This document describes example cases where
this mechanism would be useful. </t>
</abstract>
</front>
<middle>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="Introduction">
<t> The growth of "always on" broadband connections, coupled with the steady
increase in access speeds, have caused unforeseen problems for
network operators and users alike. Users are increasingly seeing congestion at peak times and
changes in usage patterns (with the growth of real-time streaming) simply serve
to exacerbate this. Operators want all their users to see a good service but are
unable to see where congestion problems originate. But congestion results from sharing network
capacity with others, not merely from using it. In general, today's "DSL"
and cable-internet users cannot "cause" congestion in the absence of
competing traffic. (Wireless operators and cellular internet have different
tradeoffs which we will not discuss here.) </t>
<t>Despite its central role in network control and management, congestion is a remarkably hard conept to define.
The discussions in <xref target="Bauer09"/> provide a good academic background. <xref target="RFC6077"/> defines it as "as a state
or condition that occurs when network resources are overloaded, resulting in impairments for
network users as objectively measured by the probability of loss and/or delay." An economist might define it as the condition where
the utility of a given user decreases due to an increase in network load.
Common to these definitions is the idea that an increase in load results
in a reduction of service from the network.</t>
<t>Congestion takes two distinct forms. The first results
from the interaction of traffic from one set of users with traffic from other users, causing in a reduction in service (a cost)
for all of them.
the second, often referred to as "self-congestion", occurs when an increase in traffic from a
single user causes that user to suffer a worse service (for instance because their traffic is being
"shaped" by their ISP, or because they have an excessively large buffer in their home router). ConEx
is principally interested in the first form of congestion since it involves informing those other users
of the impact you expect to have on them.</t>
<t> While building out more capacity to handle increased traffic is always
good, the expense and lead-time can be prohibitive, especially for network
operators that charge flat-rate feeds to subscribers and are thus unable
to charge heavier users more for causing more congestion <xref target="BB-incentive"></xref>.
The operators also face the challenge that network traffic grows according to Moore's Law -- increasing
capacity may only be buying a few months grace before you are again facing increasing congestion, reducing
utility and customers demanding a better service. For an operator
facing congestion caused by other operators' networks, building out its
own capacity is unlikely to solve the congestion problem. Operators are
thus facing increased pressure to find effective solutions to dealing
with the increasing bandwidth demands of all users. </t>
<t> The growth of "scavenger" behaviour (e.g. <xref target="LEDBAT"></xref>) helps to reduce congestion,
but can actually make the problem less tractable. These
users are trying to make good use of the capacity of the path while minimising their own costs. Thus, users of such
services may show very heavy total traffic up until the moment congestion
is detected (at the Transport Layer), but then will immediately back off.
Monitoring (at the Internet Layer) cannot detect this congestion avoidance
if the congestion in question is in a different domain further along the
path and hence such users may get tretated as congestion-causing users. </t>
<t>The ConEx working group proposes that Internet Protocol (IP) packets will carry additional ConEx information.
The exact protocol details are not described in this document, but the ConEx information will be sufficient
to allow any node in the network to see how much congestion is attributable to a given traffic flow. See
<xref target="ConEx-Abstract-Mech"></xref> for further details.</t>
<t>
Changes from previous drafts (to be removed by the RFC Editor):
<list style="hanging">
<t hangText="From draft-ietf-conex-concepts-uses-00 to -01:"></t>
<t>Added section on timescales: <xref target="conex-uses-timescales"/></t>
<t>Revised introduction to clarify congestion definitions</t>
<t>Changed source for congestion definition in <xref target="conex-uses-defs"/> </t>
<t>Other minor changes</t>
<t hangText="From draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses-02 to draft-ietf-conex-concepts-uses-00 (per decisions of working group):"> </t>
<t>Removed section on DDoS mitigation use case.</t>
<t>Removed appendix on ConEx Architectural Elements. PLEASE NOTE: Alignment of terminology with the
Abstract Mechanism draft has been deferred to the next version. </t>
<t hangText="From draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses-01 to draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses-02:"> </t>
<t>Updated document to take account of the new Abstract Mechanism draft <xref target="ConEx-Abstract-Mech"></xref>. </t>
<t>Updated the definitions section.</t>
<t>Removed sections on Requirements and Mechanism. </t>
<t>Moved section on ConEx Architectural Elements to appendix.</t>
<t>Minor changes throughout.</t>
<t hangText="From draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses-00 to draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses-01:"> </t>
<t>Changed end of Abstract to better reflect new title </t>
<t>Created new section describing the architectural elements of ConEx. Added
Edge Monitors and Border Monitors (other elements are Ingress, Egress and Border Policers).</t>
<t>Extensive re-write of <xref target="conex-uses-cases"></xref> partly in response to suggestions from Dirk Kutscher </t>
<t>Improved layout of <xref target="conex-uses-defs"></xref> and added definitions of Whole Path Congestion, ConEx-Enabled and ECN-Enabled.
Re-wrote definition of Congestion Volume.
Renamed Ingress and Egress Router to Ingress and Egress Node as these nodes may not actually be routers.</t>
<t>Improved document structure. Merged sections on Exposing Congestion and ECN. </t>
<t>Added new section on ConEx requirements with a ConEx Issues
subsection. Text for these came from the start of the old ConEx Use Cases section </t>
<t>Added a sub-section on Partial vs Full Deployment <xref target="conex-uses-deployment"></xref> </t>
<t>Added a discussion on ConEx as a Business Secret <xref target="conex-uses-secret"></xref> </t>
<t hangText="From draft-conex-mechanism-00 to draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses-00:"> </t>
<t>Changed filename to draft-moncaster-conex-concepts-uses.</t>
<t>Changed title to ConEx Concepts and Use Cases.</t>
<t>Chose uniform capitalisation of ConEx.</t>
<t>Moved definition of Congestion Volume to list of definitions.</t>
<t>Clarified mechanism section. Changed section title.</t>
<t>Modified text relating to conex-aware policing and policers (which are NOT defined terms). </t>
<t>Re-worded bullet on distinguishing ConEx and non-ConEx traffic in <xref target="conex-uses-cases"></xref>. </t>
</list>
</t>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="Definitions" anchor="conex-uses-defs">
<t> In this section we define a number of terms
that are used throughout the document. The key definition is that of congestion,
which has a number of meanings depending on context. The definition we use in
this document is based on the definition in <xref target="RFC6077"/>. This list of definitions
is supplementary to that in <xref target="ConEx-Abstract-Mech"></xref>.
<list style="hanging">
<t hangText="Congestion:"> Congestion occurs when any user's traffic
suffers increased delay, loss or ECN marking as a result of one or more
network resources being overloaded. </t>
<t hangText="Flow:">a series of packets from a
single sender to a single receiver that are treated by that sender as belonging to
a single stream for the purposes of congestion control. NB in general this is not the same
as the aggregate of all traffic between the sender and receiver.</t>
<t hangText="Congestion-rate:">For any granularity of traffic (packet, flow, aggregate, etc.),
the instantaneous rate of traffic discarded or marked due to congestion. Conceptually, the
instantaneous bit-rate of the traffic multiplied by the instantaneous congestion it is experiencing. </t>
<t hangText="Congestion-volume:"> For any granularity of traffic (packet, flow, aggregate, etc.), the
volume of bytes dropped or marked in a given period of time. Conceptually, congestion-rate multipled by time.</t>
<t hangText="Upstream Congestion:"> the accumulated level of congestion experienced by
a traffic flow thus far along its path. In other words, at any point the Upstream Congestion is
the accmulated level of congestion the traffic flow has experienced as it travels from the sender to that point.
At the receiver this is equivalent to the end-to-end congestion level that (usually) is reported back to the sender.</t>
<t hangText="Downstream Congestion:">the level of congestion a flow of traffic
is expected to experience on the remainder of its path. In other words, at any point the
Downstream Congestion is the level of congestion the traffic flow is yet to experience
as it travels from that point to the receiver.</t>
<t hangText="Ingress:"> the first node a
packet traverses that is outside the source's own network. In a domestic network
that will be the first node downstream from the home access equipment.
In an enterprise network this is the provider edge router. </t>
<t hangText="Egress:"> the last node a packet
traverses before reaching the receiver's network. </t>
<t hangText="ConEx-enabled:"> Any piece of equipment (end-system, router, tunnel end-point, firewall,
policer, etc) that complies with the core ConEx protocol, which is to be defined by the
ConEx working group. By extension a ConEx-enabled network is a network whose edge nodes are all ConEx-enabled.</t>
</list>
</t>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="Congestion Management">
<t>Since 1988 the Internet architecture has made congestion management the
responsibility of the end-systems. The network signals congestion to the receiver,
the receiver feeds this back to the sender and the sender is expected to try and
reduce the traffic it sends.</t>
<t>Any network that is persistently highly congested is inefficient. However the
total absence of congestion is equally bad as it means there is spare capacity in
the network that hasn’t been used. The long-standing aim of congestion control has
been to find the point where these two things are in balance.</t>
<t>Over recent years, some network operators have come to the view that end-system
congestion management is insufficient. Because of the heuristics used by TCP, a
relatively small number of end-machines can get a disproportionately high share of
network resources. They have sought to “correct” this perceived problem by using
middleboxes that try and reduce traffic that is causing congestion or by artificially
starving some traffic classes to create stronger congestion signals.</t>
<section title="Existing Approaches">
<t>The authors have chosen not to exhaustively list current approaches to congestion management.
Broadly these approaches can be divided into those that happen at Layer 3 of the OSI model and
those that use information gathered from higher layers. In general these approaches
attempt to find a "proxy" measure for congestion. Layer 3 approaches include:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Volume accounting — the overall volume of traffic a given user or network sends
is measured. Users may be subject to an absolute volume cap (e.g. 10Gbytes per month) or
the "heaviest" users may be sanctioned in some manner.</t>
<t>Rate measurement — the traffic rate per user or per network can be measured. The
absolute rate a given user sends at may be limited at peak hours or the average rate
may be used as the basis for inter-network billing. </t>
</list>
Higher layer approaches include:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Bottleneck rate policing — bottleneck flow rate policers aim to share the available
capacity at a given bottleneck between all concurrent users.</t>
<t>DPI and application rate policing — deep packet inspection and other techniques can
be used to determine what application a given traffic flow is associated with. Operators may
then use this information to rate-limit or otherwise sanction certain applications at peak hours.</t>
</list>
</t>
<t>All of these current approaches suffer from some general limitations. First,
they introduce performance uncertainty. Flat-rate pricing plans are popular
because users appreciate the certainty of having their monthly bill amount
remain the same for each billing period, allowing them to plan their costs
accordingly. But while flat-rate pricing avoids billing uncertainty, it
creates performance uncertainty: users cannot know whether the performance
of their connection is being altered or degraded based on how the network
operator manages congestion. </t> <t>Second, none of the approaches is able to make use of what may be the most
important factor in managing congestion: the amount that a given endpoint
contributes to congestion on the network. This information simply is not
available to network nodes, and neither volume nor rate nor application
usage is an adequate proxy for congestion volume, because none of these
metrics measures a user or network's actual contribution to congestion on
the network. </t> <t> Finally, none of these solutions accounts for inter-network congestion.
Mechanisms may exist that allow an operator to identify and mitigate
congestion in their own network, but the design of the Internet means that
only the end-hosts have full visibility of congestion information along the
whole path. ConEx allows this information to be visible to everyone on the
path and thus allows operators to make better-informed decisions about
controlling traffic. </t>
</section>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="Exposing Congestion">
<t> We argue that current traffic-control mechanisms seek to control the
wrong quantity. What matters in the network is neither the volume of
traffic nor the rate of traffic: it is the contribution to congestion over
time — congestion means that your traffic impacts other users,
and conversely that their traffic impacts you. So if there is no congestion
there need not be any restriction on the amount a user can send;
restrictions only need to apply when others are sending traffic such that
there is congestion. </t>
<t> For example, an application intending to transfer large amounts of data
could use a congestion control mechanism like <xref target="LEDBAT"></xref>
to reduce its transmission rate before any competing TCP flows do, by
detecting an increase in end-to-end delay (as a measure of impending
congestion). However such techniques rely on voluntary, altruistic action
by end users and their application providers. Operators can neither enforce
their use nor avoid penalizing them for congestion they avoid. </t>
<t> The Internet was designed so that end-hosts detect and control congestion.
We argue that congestion needs to be visible to network nodes as well, not
just to the end hosts. More specifically, a network needs to be able to
measure how much congestion any particular traffic expects to cause between
the monitoring point in the network and the destination ("rest-of-path
congestion"). This would be a new capability. Today a network can use
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) <xref target="RFC3168"></xref> to
detect how much congestion the traffic has suffered between the source and
a monitoring point, but not beyond. This new capability would enable an
ISP to give incentives for the use of LEDBAT-like applications that seek to
minimise congestion in the network whilst restricting inappropriate uses
of traditional TCP and UDP applications. </t>
<t> So we propose a new approach which we call Congestion Exposure. We
propose that congestion information should be made visible at the IP
layer, so that any network node can measure the contribution to congestion
of an aggregate of traffic as easily as straight volume can be measured
today. Once the information is exposed in this way, it is then
possible to use it to measure the true impact of any traffic on the
network. </t>
<t> In general, congestion exposure gives operators a principled way to hold their
customers accountable for the impact on others of their network usage and
reward them for choosing congestion-sensitive applications. </t>
<section title="ECN - a Step in the Right Direction">
<t> Explicit Congestion Notification <xref target="RFC3168"></xref> allows
routers to explicitly tell end-hosts that they are approaching the point of
congestion. ECN builds on Active Queue Mechanisms such as random early
discard (RED) <xref target="RFC2309"></xref> by allowing the router to mark
a packet with a Congestion Experienced (CE) codepoint, rather than dropping
it. The probability of a packet being marked increases with the length of
the queue and thus the rate of CE marks is a guide to the level of congestion
at that queue. This CE codepoint travels forward through the network to the
receiver which then informs the sender that it has seen congestion. The
sender is then required to respond as if it had experienced a packet loss.
Because the CE codepoint is visible in the IP layer, this approach reveals
the upstream congestion level for a packet.</t>
<t> Alas, this is not enough - ECN gives downstream nodes an idea of the
congestion so far for any flow. This can help hold a receiver accountable for
the congestion caused by incoming traffic. But a receiver can only indirectly
influence incoming congestion, by politely asking the sender to control it. A
receiver cannot make a sender install an adaptive codec, or install LEDBAT
instead of TCP congestion-control. And a receiver cannot cause an attacker to
stop flooding it with traffic. </t>
<t> What is needed is knowledge of the downstream congestion level, for which
you need additional information that is still concealed from the network. </t>
</section>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="ConEx Use Cases" anchor="conex-uses-cases">
<t> This section sets out some of the use cases for ConEx. These use cases rely on some
of the conceptual elements described in <xref target="ConEx-Abstract-Mech"></xref>.
The authors don't claim this is an
exhaustive list of use cases, nor that these have equal merit. In most cases ConEx is not the only
solution to achieve these. But these use cases represent a consensus among
people that have been working on this approach for some years.
</t>
<section title="ConEx as a basis for traffic management" anchor="conex-uses-traff-man">
<t> Currently many operators impose some form of traffic management at peak hours. This
is a simple economic necessity — the only reason the Internet works
as a commercial concern is that operators are able to rely on statistical multiplexing
to share their expensive core network between large numbers of customers. In order
to ensure all customers get some chance to access the network, the "heaviest"
customers will be subjected to some form of traffic management at peak times
(typically a rate cap for certain types of traffic) <xref target="Fair-use"></xref>. Often this traffic
management is done with expensive flow aware devices such as DPI boxes or flow-aware
routers. </t>
<t> ConEx offers a better approach that will actually target the users that are causing the congestion.
By using Ingress or Egress Policers, an ISP can identify which users are causing the greatest Congestion
Volume throughout the network. This can then be used as the basis for traffic management decisions. The
Ingress Policer described in <xref target="Policing-freedom"></xref> is one interesting approach
that gives the user a congestion volume limit. So long as they stay within their limit then their
traffic is unaffected. Once they exceed that limit then their traffic will be blocked temporarily.</t>
</section>
<section title="ConEx to incentivise scavenger transports"anchor="conex-uses-scavenge">
<t> Recent work proposes a new approach for QoS where traffic is provided with a less
than best effort or "scavenger" quality of service. The idea is that low priority
but high volume traffic such as OS updates, P2P file transfers and view-later TV
programs should be allowed to use any spare network capacity, but should rapidly
get out of the way if a higher priority or interactive application starts up.
One solution being actively explored is LEDBAT which proposes a new congestion
control algorithm that is less aggressive in seeking out bandwidth than TCP. </t>
<t> At present most operators assume a strong correlation between the volume of a flow
and the impact that flow causes in the network. This assumption has been eroded
by the growth of interactive streaming which behaves in an inelastic manner and hence
can cause high congestion at relatively low data volumes. Currently LEDBAT-like transports
get no incentive from the ISP since they still transfer large volumes of data and may
reach high transfer speeds if the network is uncongested. Consequently the only current
incentive for LEDBAT is that it can reduce self-congestion effects.</t>
<t> If the ISP has deployed a ConEx-aware Ingress Policer then they are able to
incentivise the use of LEDBAT because a user will be policed according to the
overall congestion volume their traffic generates, not the rate or data volume. If all background file
transfers are only generating a low level of congestion, then the sender has
more "congestion budget" to "spend" on their interactive applications. It can
be shown <xref target="Kelly"></xref> that this approach improves social welfare — in
other words if you limit the congestion that all users can generate then
everyone benefits from a better service. </t>
</section>
<section title="Accounting for Congestion Volume" anchor="conex-congest-account">
<t>
Accountability was one of the original design goals for the Internet <xref target="Design-Philosophy"></xref>. At
the time it was ranked low because the network was non-commercial and it was assumed
users had the best interests of the network at heart. Nowadays users generally treat the
network as a commodity and the Internet has become highly commercialised. This
causes problems for operators and others which they have tried to solve and often leads to a
tragedy of the commons where users end up fighting each other for scarce peak capacity.</t>
<t>The most elegant
solution would be to introduce an Internet-wide system of accountability where every actor in
the network is held to account for the impact they have on others. If
Policers are placed at every Network Ingress or Egress and Border Monitors at
every border, then you have the basis for a system of congestion accounting. Simply by
controlling the overall Congestion Volume each end-system or stub-network can send you
ensure everyone gets a better service.</t>
</section>
<section title="ConEx as a form of differential QoS" anchor="conex-uses-qos">
<t> Most QoS approaches require the active participation of routers to control the
delay and loss characteristics for the traffic. For real-time interactive traffic
it is clear that low delay (and predictable jitter) are critical, and thus these probably
always need different treatment at a router. However if low loss is the issue
then ConEx offers an alternative approach.</t>
<t>Assuming the ingress ISP has deployed a ConEx Ingress Policer, then the only control
on a user's traffic is dependent on the congestion that user has caused. Likewise, if
they are receiving traffic through a ConEx Egress Policer then their ISP will impose
traffic controls (prioritisation, rate limiting, etc) based on the congestion they have caused.
If an end-user (be they the receiver or sender) wants to prioritise some
traffic over other traffic then they can allow that traffic to generate or cause more
congestion. The price they will pay will be to reduce the congestion that their other
traffic causes. </t>
<t> Streaming video content-delivery is a good candidate for such ConEx-mediated QoS. Such traffic
can tolerate moderately high delays, but there are strong economic pressures to maintain
a high enough data rate (as that will directly influence the Quality of Experience the
end-user receives. This approach removes the need for bandwidth brokers to establish QoS
sessions, by removing the need to coordinate requests from multiple sources to pre-allocate
bandwidth, as well as to coordinate which allocations to revoke when bandwidth predictions
turn out to be wrong. There is also no need to "rate-police" at the boundaries on a per-flow basis,
removing the need to keep per-flow state (which in turn makes this approach more scalable).</t>
</section>
<section title="Partial vs. Full Deployment" anchor="conex-uses-deployment">
<t>In a fully-deployed ConEx-enabled internet, <xref target="QoS-Models"></xref> shows that ISP settlements based on congestion
volume can allocate money to where upgrades are needed. Fully-deployed implies that ConEx-marked
packets which have not exhausted their expected congestion would go through a congested path
in preference to non-ConEx packets, with money changing hands to justify that priority. </t>
<t>In a partial deployment, routers that ignore ConEx markings and let them pass unaltered are no problem unless
they become congested and drop packets. Since ConEx incentivises the use of lower congestion
transports, such congestion drops should anyway become rare events. ConEx-unaware routers that do
drop ConEx-marked packets would cause a problem so to minimise this risk ConEx should be designed such that ConEx packets will appear
valid to any node they traverse. Failing that it could be possible to bypass such nodes with a tunnel. </t>
<t>If any network is not ConEx enabled then the sender and receiver have to rely on ECN-marking or packet drops to
establish the congestion level. If the receiver isn't ConEx-enabled then there needs to be some
form of compatibility mode. Even in such partial deployments the end-users and access networks will
benefit from ConEx. This will put create incentives for ConEx to be more widely adopted as
access networks put pressure on their backhaul providers to use congestion as the basis of their
interconnect agreement. </t>
<t>The actual charge per unit of congestion would be specified in an interconnection agreement,
with economic pressure driving that charge downward to the cost to upgrade whenever alternative
paths are available. That charge would most likely be invisible to the majority of users. Instead
such users will have a contractual allowance to cause congestion, and would see packets dropped
when that allowance is depleted. </t>
<t> Once an Autonomous System (AS) agrees to pay any congestion charges to any other AS it forwards to,
it has an economic incentive to increase congestion-so-far marking for any congestion within its
network. Failure to do this quickly becomes a significant cost, giving it an incentive to turn on such marking. </t>
<t> End users (or the writers of the applications they use) will be given an incentive to use a congestion control
that back off more aggressively than TCP for any elastic traffic. Indeed they will actually have an
incentive to use fully weighted congestion controls that allow traffic to cause congestion in proportion
to its priority. Traffic which backs off more aggressively than TCP will see congestion charges remain
the same (or even drop) as congestion increases; traffic which backs off less aggressively will see charges
rise, but the user may be prepared to accept this if it is high-priority traffic; traffic which backs
off not at all will see charges rise dramatically. </t>
</section>
</section>
<section title="Statistical Multiplexing over Differing Timescales" anchor="conex-uses-timescales">
<t>Access networks are usually provisioned assuming statistical multiplexing, where end-users are presumed not
all to use their maximum bandwidth simultaneously. Typically, an ISP might design access networks with shared
resources (e.g., circuits, ports, schedulers) dimensioned in proportion to the sum of average usage by the
customers involved. Generally, ISPs monitor actual usage averaged over some time period (typically stated in minutes)
to plan when upgrades to shared resources will be needed.</t>
<t>Almost always, they find that certain busy periods of the day have higher usage; and that actual contention for bandwidth
at a shared resource (e.g., circuit, port, scheduler) is limited to those periods. This leads to "economic congestion" as
defined in Section 3.4 of <xref target="Bauer09"/>, where traffic by one end-user imposes a "cost" of reduced utility on other users.
Sometimes, there is an extended period between economic congestion being first observed and the completion of upgrades.
In other cases, a trend of "economic congestion" is used by a service provider before congestion as defined in the abstract
mechanism (loss or ECN marking) occurs.</t>
<t>During busy periods, it has been observed that roughly 20% of the end-users are using 80% of the bandwidth <xref target="Varian"/>. We call
this roughly-20% "heavy users", and the others "light users". Left to itself, this situation means that heavy users cause queues
to fill at a rate much greater than light users do. (Note that this heavy/light categorization is for illustrative purposes since
there is actually a continuum of "heaviness" across users.) When both heavy and light users pay the same flat rate, ISPs believe
heavy users should bear more of the "cost" of reduced utility. </t>
<t>When all users have unlimited access to a shared resource bottleneck, this problem is the most severe since maximum per user
bandwidth is that of the shared resource. In order to provide more control over the maximum rate at which individual users
may send, many ISPs have deployed "traffic shapers" to limit bandwidth available to an individual user during all time periods.
Note that this limits the per user maximum bandwidth in the sub-second timeframe of the shaper queue. Currently, these "shapers"
make no distinction between busy periods where shared resource congestion may occur and periods when no congestion occurs.</t>
<t>During a period of higher usage, a shared resource becomes the bottleneck and causes filling of a shared queue or individual
user shaper queues. However, heavy users create much more queuing and therefore potentially more congestion volume <xref target="conex-uses-defs"/>
as compared with lighter users. This means that during periods of higher usage, heavier and lighter
users see comparable congestion (i.e., packet loss or ECN marking). Thus, the overall utility (i.e., probability of a packet
not being lost or ECN marked) is reduced by the fewer heavier users at the expense of the many lighter users.</t>
<t>During periods of lighter usage, heavier users will fill their individual shaper queues, potentially creating loss or ECN
marking, such that TCP congestion-control does what the ISP desires and cuts back the sending rate giving the user the
expected maximum bandwidth.</t>
<section title="ConEx Objectives for This Issue" anchor="conex-uses-timescale-objectives">
<t>ConEx should provide better information for a provider to address the "economic congestion" problem. Specifically, ConEx
should help to distinguish which users cause queue-filling over a time interval matching the economic congestion and statistical
multiplexing algorithm time scales. This can range from seconds, to minutes, to hours. It is also desirable to distinguish
"self-congestion" where there is no contention for a shared resource bandwidth (e.g., circuit, port, scheduler), which is
referred to as "inter-user congestion" in the following. If this is visible to end-users, they could use an out-of-band
mechanism to "go faster" if only "self-congestion" is limiting their throughput.</t>
<t>There are (at least) three approaches for addressing this issue.
<list style="numbers">
<t>Treat "self-congestion" the same as "inter-user congestion" since they both
create congestion as perceived by the flow user; </t>
<t>Signal more information to the receiver about the cause of loss since
the remedy may differ;</t>
<t>Process (and generate) ConEx information at the same network element which
implements the shaper, which has knowledge of the configured maximum bandwidth for
the users as well as local shared resource congestion.</t>
</list>
For the most part, these don't require any changes to the abstract mechanism; but a subcase of 2),
where the traffic-shaper might use ConEx to signal that the "congestion" is actually due to traffic-shaping,
not shared resource contention, could require additional signaling to be defined in the ConEx protocol.</t>
<t>Note that during busy periods "self congestion" might not be the limiting factor, but there will inevitably
be less-busy periods where "self-congestion" will predominate.</t>
</section>
<section title="ConEx as a Solution" anchor="conex-uses-timescales-soln">
<t>Over a time period related to the statistical multiplexing or economic congestion interval (e.g., many
seconds to minutes to hours) total up the number of bytes that have been congestion marked and the total
number of bytes sent per end-user. Compute the ratio of congested bytes to total bytes. This measures the
average rate per user.</t>
<t>Quantizing users into classes using one threshold on total and and another threshold on ratio results in
a grid that identifies four classes of user:</t>
<figure anchor="conex-uses-table" title="Four Classes of User">
<artwork><![CDATA[
+------------+-------------+-------------+
| | Volume |
| Ratio | Large | Small |
+------------+-------------+-------------+
| High | Heavy User | Bursty User |
+------------+-------------+-------------+
| Low | LEDBAT User | Light User |
+------------+-------------+-------------+
(Where "LEDBAT User" includes other Less-than-Best-Effort algorithms.)
]]></artwork>
</figure>
<t>Note that Bursty and Heavy Users contribute more to congestion marking, but a Bursty user contributes less
overall congestion marking and may be creating shorter periods of queue filling as compared with heavy users.
LEDBAT and light users create less to congestion marking, with LEDBAT users able to transfer more volume as
compared with light users since LEDBAT users back off before congestion marking occurs. An operator might reasonably
take this into account in their shaping algorithms.</t>
</section>
<section title="Additional Support Using other Measures and Mechanisms" anchor="conex-uses-timescales-other">
<t>An additional congestion measure of burstiness (in addition to "congestion") would allow nodes upstream from
the node implementing the shaper to implement traffic management. This measure could be derived from signals in
the abstract mechanism but would require (a majority) of the heavier senders and receivers to implement conex and
also would only work if loss or ECN marking occurs. Also, signaling a measure of the burstiness (or something
related to it) would partially address the scenario where no loss or ECN marking occurs.</t>
<t>As an alternative, a "light weight" TCP proxy might be implemented at the network element containing the shaper,
and an upstream network element (e.g., an ingress router), could potentially create a ConEx control loop between
these network elements to provide more optimal balance between heavier and lighter users during congested intervals.
This would be a closed domain where the signals could be implicitly trusted. The burstiness measure could be communicated
using TCP extensions between these proxies.</t>
<t>There is also the aspect of "self congestion" where a traffic-shaper is at the access node. Using the current mechanisms,
the receiver cannot tell the difference between "self-congestion" and "inter-user congestion." Adding a signal to the
abstract mechanism could enable a receiver to inform the sender about the cause of congestion, enabling the sender to
request that the traffic-shaper parameters change to enable the flow to "go faster".</t>
</section>
</section>
<section title="Other issues">
<section title="Congestion as a Commercial Secret" anchor="conex-uses-secret">
<t>
Network operators have long viewed the congestion levels in their
network as a business secret. In some ways this harks back to the days
of fixed-line telecommunications where congestion manifested as failed
connections or dropped calls. But even in modern data-centric packet
networks congestion is viewed as a secret not to be shared with
competitors. It can be debated whether this view is sensible, but it
may make operators uneasy about deploying ConEx. The following two
examples highlight some of the arguments used:
<list style="symbols">
<t>An ISP buys backhaul capacity from an operator. Most operators want their
customers to get a decent service and so they want the backhaul to be
relatively uncongested. If there is competition, operators will seek
to reassure their customers (the operators) that their network is not congested in
order to attract their custom. Some operators may
see ConEx as a threat since it will enable those operators to see the actual congestion
in their network. On the other hand, operators with low congestion
could use ConEx to show how well their network performs, and so might have
an incentive to enable it.</t>
<t>ISPs would like to be part of the lucrative content provision market. Currently
the ISP can gain a competitive edge as it can put its own content in a higher QoS class,
whereas traffic from content providers has to use the
Best Effort class. The ISP may take the view that if they can conceal the congestion
level in their Best Effort class this will make it harder for the content provider
to maintain a good level of QoS. But in reality the Content Provider will just
use the feedback mechanisms in streaming protocols such as Adobe Flash to monitor the
congestion.</t>
</list>
Of course some might say that the idea of keeping congestion secret is silly. After
all, end-hosts already have knowledge of the congestion throughout the network, albeit only
along specific paths, and operators can work out that there is persistent congestion as their
customers will be suffering degraded network performance.
</t>
</section>
<section title="Information Security">
<t> make a source believe it has seen more congestion than it has </t>
<t> hijack a user's identity and make it appear they are dishonest at an egress
policer </t>
<t> clear or otherwise tamper with the ConEx markings </t>
<t> ... </t>
<t>{ToDo} Write these up properly...</t>
</section>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="Security Considerations">
<t> This document proposes a mechanism tagging onto Explicit Congestion Notification
<xref target="RFC3168"/>, and inherits the security issues listed therein. The
additional issues from ConEx markings relate to the degree of trust
each forwarding point places in the ConEx markings it receives, which is
a business decision mostly orthogonal to the markings themselves. </t>
<t> One expected use of exposed congestion information is to hold the end-to-end
transport and the network accountable to each other. The network cannot be relied
on to report information to the receiver against its interest, and the same applies
for the information the receiver feeds back to the sender, and that the sender
reports back to the network. Looking at each in turn:
<list style="hanging">
<t hangText="The Network"> In general it is not in any network's interest to under-declare
congestion since this will have potentially negative consequences for all users
of that network. It may be in its interest to over-declare congestion if, for
instance, it wishes to force traffic to move away to a different network or
simply to reduce the amount of traffic it is carrying. Congestion Exposure
itself won't significantly alter the incentives for and against honest
declaration of congestion by a network, but we can imagine applications of
Congestion Exposure that will change these incentives. There is a perception
among network operators that their level of congestion is a business secret.
Today, congestion is one of the worst-kept secrets a network has, because
end-hosts can see congestion better than network operators can. Congestion
Exposure will enable network operators to pinpoint whether congestion is on
one side or the other of any border. It is conceivable that forwarders with
underprovisioned networks may try to obstruct deployment of Congestion
Exposure. </t>
<t hangText="The Receiver"> Receivers generally have an incentive to under-declare
congestion since they generally wish to receive the data from the sender as
rapidly as possible. <xref target="Savage"></xref> explains how a receiver can
significantly improve their throughput my failing to declare congestion. This
is a problem with or without Congestion Exposure. <xref target="KGao"></xref>
explains one possible technique to encourage receiver's to be honest in their
declaration of congestion.</t>
<t hangText="The Sender"> One proposed mechanism for Congestion Exposure deployment adds
a requirement for a sender to advise the network how much congestion it has
suffered or caused. Although most senders currently respond to congestion
they are informed of, one use of exposed congestion information might be to
encourage sources of persistent congestion to back off more aggressively.
Then clearly there may be an incentive for the sender to under-declare
congestion. This will be a particular problem with sources of flooding
attacks. "Policing" mechanisms have been proposed to deal with this. </t>
</list>
In addition there are potential problems from source spoofing. A malicious
sender can pretend to be another user by spoofing the source address.
Congestion Exposure allows for "Policers" and "Traffic Shapers" so as to be
robust against injection of false congestion information into the forward
path. </t>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="IANA Considerations">
<t>This document does not require actions by IANA.</t>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
<section title="Acknowledgments">
<t>Bob Briscoe is partly funded by Trilogy, a research project
(ICT-216372) supported by the European Community under its Seventh Framework Programme.
The views expressed here are those of the author only.</t>
<t> The authors would like to thank the many people that have commented on this document. Bernard Aboba, Mikael Abrahamsson,
João Taveira Araújo, Steve Bauer, Caitlin Bestler, Steven Blake, Louise Burness, Alissa Cooper, Philip Eardley, Matthew Ford,
Ingemar Johansson, Mirja Kuehlewind, Dirk Kutscher, Zhu Lei, Kevin Mason, Michael Menth, Chris Morrow,
Hannes Tschofenig and Stuart Venters. Please accept our apologies if your name has been missed off this list.</t>
</section>
<!-- ====================================================================== -->
</middle>
<back>
<references title="Informative References">
&RFC3168;
&RFC2309;
<reference anchor="RFC6077">
- <front>
<title>Open Research Issues in Internet Congestion Control</title>
- <author initials="D." surname="Papadimitriou" fullname="D. Papadimitriou">
<organization />
</author>
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</author>
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<organization />
</author>
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<organization />
</author>
<date year="2011" month="February" />
- <abstract>
<t>This document describes some of the open problems in Internet congestion control that are known today. This includes several new challenges that are becoming important as the network grows, as well as some issues that have been known for many years. These challenges are generally considered to be open research topics that may require more study or application of innovative techniques before Internet-scale solutions can be confidently engineered and deployed. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.</t>
</abstract>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="RFC" value="6077" />
<format type="TXT" octets="130169" target="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6077.txt" />
</reference>
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<front>
<title> Policing Congestion Response in an Internetwork Using Re-Feedback </title>
<author initials="B" surname="Briscoe" fullname="Bob Briscoe">
<organization>BT & UCL</organization>
</author>
<author initials="A" surname="Jacquet" fullname="Arnaud Jacquet">
<organization>BT</organization>
</author>
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</author>
<date month="August" year="2005" />
</front>
<seriesInfo name="ACM SIGCOMM CCR" value="35(4)277—288" />
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<reference anchor="LEDBAT">
- <front>
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<organization />
</author>
<date month="March" day="22" year="2010" />
- <abstract>
<t>LEDBAT is an alternative experimental congestion control algorithm. LEDBAT enables an advanced
networking application to minimize the extra delay it induces in the bottleneck while saturating the
bottleneck. It thus implements an end-to-end version of scavenger service. LEDBAT has been been
implemented in BitTorrent DNA, as the exclusive congestion control mechanism, and in uTorrent, as
an experimental mechanism, and deployed in the wild with favorable results.</t>
</abstract>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="Internet-Draft" value="draft-ietf-ledbat-congestion-01" />
<format type="TXT" target="http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ledbat-congestion-01.txt" />
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<front>
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</author>
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<front>
<title> Incrementally Deployable Prevention to TCP Attack with Misbehaving Receivers </title>
<author initials="K." surname="Gao" fullname="Kun Gar">
<organization> Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University </organization>
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<format type="HTML" target="http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/fair-usage-broadband.html"></format>
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<front>
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<organization />
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<date month="December" year="2008"/>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="IEEE Spectrum" value="Dec 2008 pp38-43"></seriesInfo>
<format type="HTML" target="http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/standards/a-fairer-faster-internet-protocol"></format>
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<reference anchor='Policing-freedom'>
<front>
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</author>
<author initials="T" surname="Moncaster" fullname="Toby Moncaster">
<organization>BT</organization>
</author>
<date month='December' day="4" year='2008' />
</front>
<seriesInfo name="RE-Arch 2008 hosted at the 2008 CoNEXT conference" value="" />
<format type='PDF' target='http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1544083&type=pdf&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=94433196&CFTOKEN=11585540' />
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<front>
<title>
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</title>
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<organization>Cam Uni</organization>
</author>
<author initials="A.K" surname="Maulloo" fullname="Aman K. Maulloo">
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</author>
<date month="" year="1998" />
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<front>
<title>
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</author>
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<reference anchor="QoS-Models" >
<front>
<title>
Commercial Models for IP Quality of Service Interconnect
</title>
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</author>
<author initials="S" surname="Rudkin" fullname="Steve Rudkin">
<organization>BT</organization>
</author>
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<reference anchor="re-ecn-motive">
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<title>Re-ECN: A Framework for adding Congestion Accountability to TCP/IP</title>
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<organization />
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-
</front>
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<front>
<title>Congestion Exposure (ConEx) Concepts and Abstract Mechanism</title>
- <author initials="B" surname="Briscoe" fullname="Bob Briscoe">
<organization />
</author>
<date month="March" day="03" year="2011" />
- <abstract>
<t>This document describes an abstract mechanism by which senders inform the network about the congestion
encountered by packets earlier in the same flow. Today, the network may signal congestion to the receiver
by ECN markings or by dropping packets, and the receiver may pass this information back to the sender in
transport-layer feedback. The mechanism to be developed by the ConEx WG will enable the sender to also
relay this congestion information back into the network in- band at the IP layer, such that the total level
of congestion is visible to all IP devices along the path, from where it could, for example, be provided as
input to traffic management.</t>
</abstract>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="Internet-Draft" value="draft-ietf-conex-abstract-mech-00" />
<format type="TXT" target="http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-conex-abstract-mech-00.txt" />
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<front>
<title>Congestion pricing principles</title>
<author initials="H" surname="Varian" fullname="Hal Varian">
<organization>Google</organization></author>
<date day="29" month="July" "year="2010"/>
</front>
<seriesInfo name="Technical Plenary" value="78th IETF Meeting" />
</reference>
</references>
</back>
</rfc>| PAFTECH AB 2003-2026 | 2026-04-23 10:14:57 |