One document matched: draft-partridge-e2e-ackspacing-00.txt

End-To-End Research Group                                   C. Partridge
Request for Comments: DRAFT                             BBN Technologies
Category: Informational                                        July 1997



 ACK Spacing for High Delay-Bandwidth Paths with Insufficient Buffering

                     <draft-partridge-e2e-ackspacing-00.txt>



                          Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft.  Internet-Drafts are working
   documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
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   This document is a product of the End-To-End Research Group of the
   Internet Research Task Force.  Comments are solicited and should be
   addressed to the author or the End-To-End Interest list (end2end-
   interest@isi.edu).

   This draft expires 29 January 1998.

1. Introduction

   Suppose you want TCP implementations to be able to fill a 155 Mb/s
   path.  Further suppose that the path includes a satellite in a
   geosynchronous orbit, so the round trip delay through the path is at
   least 500 ms, and the delay-bandwidth product is 9.7 megabytes or
   more.

   If we further assume the TCP implementations support TCP Large
   Windows and PAWS (many do), so they can manage 9.7 MB TCP window,
   then we can be sure the TCP will eventually start sending at full



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RFC DRAFT                                                      July 1997


   path rate (unless the satellite channel is very lossy).  But it may
   take a long time to get the TCP up to full speed.

   One (of several) possible causes of the delay is a shortage of
   buffering in routers.  To understand this particular problem,
   consider the following idealized behavior of TCP during slow start.
   During slow start, for every segment ACKed, the sender transmits two
   new segments.  In effect, this behavior means the sender is
   transmitting at *twice* the data rate of the segments being ACKed.
   And keep in mind the separation between ACKs represents (in an ideal
   world) the rate segments can flow through the bottleneck router in
   the path.  So the sender is bursting data at twice the bottleneck
   rate, and a queue must be forming during the burst.  In the simplest
   case, the queue is entirely at the bottleneck router, and at the end
   of the burst, the queue is storing half the data in the burst.  (Why
   half?  During the burst, we transmitted at twice the bottleneck rate.
   Suppose it takes one time unit to send a segment on the bottlenecked
   link.  During the burst the bottleneck will receive two segments in
   every time unit, but only be able to transmit one segment.  The
   result is a net of one new segment queued every time unit, for the
   life of the burst.)

   TCP will end the slow start phase in response to the first lost
   datagram.  Assuming good quality transmission links, the first lost
   datagram will be lost because the bottleneck queue overflowed.  We'd
   like that loss to occur in the round-trip after the slow start
   congestion window has reached the delay-bandwidth product.  Now
   consider the buffering required in the bottleneck link during the
   next to last round trip.  The sender will send an entire delay-
   bandwidth worth of data in one-half a round-trip time (because it
   sends at twice the channel rate).   So for half the round-trip time,
   the bottleneck router is in the mode of forwarding one segment while
   receiving two. (For the second half of the round-trip, the router is
   draining its queue).  That means, to avoid losing any segments, the
   router must have buffering equal to half the delay-bandwidth product,
   or nearly 5 MB.

   Most routers do not have anywhere near 5 MB of buffering for a single
   link.  Or, to express this problem another way, because routers do
   not have this much buffering, the slow start stage will end
   prematurely, when router buffering is exhausted.  The consequence of
   ending slow start prematurely is severe.  At the end of slow start,
   TCP goes into congestion avoidance, in which the window size is
   increased much more slowly.  So even though the channel is free,
   because we did not have enough router buffering, we will transmit
   slowly for a period of time (until the more conservative congestion
   avoidance algorithm sends enough data to fill the channel).




<draft-e2e-ackspacing-00.txt>                           [Page 2]

RFC DRAFT                                                      July 1997


2. What to Do?

   So how to get around the shortage of router buffering?

2.1 Cascading TCPs

   One approach is to use cascading TCPs, in which we build a custom TCP
   for the satellite (or bottleneck) link and insert it between the
   sender's and receiver's TCPs, as shown below:


     sender ---- Ground station -- satellite -- ground station -- receiver

       |---------------|   |------------------------|  |---------------|
       | loop 1        |   |       loop 2           |  | loop 3        |
       |---------------|   |------------------------|  |---------------|


   This approach can work but is awkward.  Among its limitations are:
   the buffering problem remains (at points of bandwidth mismatches,
   queues will form); the scheme violates end-to-end semantics of TCP
   (the sender will get ACKs for data that has not and may never reach
   the receiver); and it doesn't work with encryption (i.e. if data
   above the IP layer is encrypted).

2.2 ACK Spacing

   Another approach is to find some way to spread the bursts, either by
   having the sender spread out the segments, or having the network
   arrange for the ACKs to arrive at the sender with a two segment
   spacing (or larger).

   Changing the sender is feasible, although it requires very good
   operating system timers.  But it has the disadvantage that only
   upgraded senders get the performance improvement.

   Finding a way for the network to space the ACKs would allow TCP
   senders to transmit at the right rate, without modification.
   Furthermore, it can be done by a router.  The router simply has to
   snoop the returning TCP ACKs and spread them out.  (Note that if the
   transmissions are encrypted, in many scenarios the router can still
   figure out which segments are likely TCP ACKs and spread them out).

   There are some difficult issues with this approach.  The most notable
   ones are:

      1. What algorithm to use to determine the proper ACK spacing.




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RFC DRAFT                                                      July 1997


      2. Related to (1), it may be necessary to known when a TCP is in
      slow-start vs. congestion-avoidance, as the desired spacing
      between ACKs is likely to be different in the two phases.

      3. What to do about assymetric routes (if anything).  If the ACKs
      do not return through the ACK-spacing router, it may not be
      possible to do ACK spacing.


   Despite these challenges the approach has appeal.  Changing software
   in a few routers (particularly those at likely bottleneck links) on
   high delay-bandwidth paths could give a performance boost to lots of
   TCP connections.

Credit and Disclaimer

   This memo presents thoughts from a discussion held at the recent
   meeting of the End-To-End (E2E) Research Group.  The particular idea
   of ACK spacing was developed by during the meeting by Mark Handley
   and Van Jacobson in response to an issue raised by the author, and
   was inspired, in part by ideas to enhance wireless routers to improve
   TCP performance [1].

   The material presented is a half-baked suggestion and should not be
   interpreted as an official recommendation of the Research Group.

References

   1. H. Balakrishnan, V.N. Padmanabhan, S. Seshan and R.H. Katz, "A
   Comparison of Mechanisms for Improving TCP Performance over Wireless
   Links", Proc. ACM SIGCOMM '96, pp. 256-269.




















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