| Diameter Maintenance and Extensions | L. Bertz |
| Internet-Draft | Sprint |
| Intended status: Standards Track | July 6, 2016 |
| Expires: January 7, 2017 |
Diameter Predicted Units
draft-bertz-dime-predictunits-00
This document specifies the conveyance of predicted usage information for proper dimensioning of network services that use Diameter based authorization.
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
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."
This Internet-Draft will expire on January 7, 2017.
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English.
When a User is authorized to use a service via Diameter applications such as [RFC4006] or [RFC7155], the Client is not aware of the average load placed upon it by User. This can lead to overload situations or the Diameter Client redirecting or denying services to valid Users even though their presence may overload the service.
Given virtualization and the use of many software based services the service capacity varies on a service instance, i.e. Diameter Client, basis.
This specification introduces the Predicted-Service-Units Attribute Value Pair (AVP). This information conveys the predicted usage introduced on the service by the authorized User. Such information can be used by the Diameter Client to estimate future load and proactively manage its resources.
Although this informaiton is conveyed from the Diameter Server to the Client several system aspects are out of the scope of this document:
In this document, the key words "MAY", "MUST", "MUST NOT", "OPTIONAL", "RECOMMENDED", "SHOULD", and "SHOULD NOT", are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
The Predicted-Service-Units AVP (AVP Code TBD1) is of type Grouped and contains the amount of units that the Diameter credit-control client can expect to provide to the end user until the service must be released or the new Credit-Control-Request must be sent, if a Granted-Service-Unit AVP [RFC4006] has been applied to the user's service. A client is not required to implement all of the unit types, and it must ingore unknown or unsupported unit types.
The Predicted-Service-Units AVP is defined as follows (per the grouped- avp-def of [RFC6733]):
Predicted-Service-Units ::= < AVP Header: TBD1 >
[ CC-Time ]
[ CC-Money ]
[ CC-Total-Octets ]
[ CC-Input-Octets ]
[ CC-Output-Octets ]
[ CC-Service-Specific-Units ]
*[ Service-Cost-Information ]
*[ AVP ]
With the exception of the Service-Cost-Information AVP, all AVPs are defined in [RFC4006].
The presence of this information is provided as anticipated load information to the Diameter Client and is not intended to be prescriptive in any manner regarding the user's service.
The Service-Cost-Information AVP (AVP Code TBD2) is of type Grouped, and it is used to return the service cost information, which the client can use, if it understands it, for various purposes inclduing load prediction and sizing.
A client is not required to implement all of the unit types, and it must ingore unknown or unsupported unit types.
It is defined as follows (per the grouped-avp-def of [RFC6733]):
Service-Cost-Information ::= < AVP Header: TBD2 >
{ Unit-Value }
{ Cost-Unit }
{ Service-Dimension }
Unit-Value and Cost-Unit are defined in [RFC4006].
The Service-Dimension AVP (AVP Code TBD3) is of type UTF8String. It specifies the applicable service type (dimension) to the Service-Cost-Information.
When Predicted-Service-Units are returned as part of an authorization per [RFC7155] or [RFC4006], the client MAY use this information as guidance on projected load the new user will generate on the service.
If the client supports/understnds the information provided in the Predicted-Service-Units AVP, it can update it's projected load. Based upon this information it MAY take one or more of the following actions (this is not exhaustive):
IANA allocated AVP codes in the IANA-controlled namespace registry specified in Section 11.1.1 of [RFC6733] for the following AVPs that are defined in this document.
| AVP | AVP Code | Section Defined | Data Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Predicted-Service-Units | TBD1 | Section 3.1 | GROUPED |
| Service-Cost-Information | TBD2 | Section 3.2 | GROUPED |
| Service-Dimension | TBD3 | Section 3.2 | UTF8String |
The Diameter base protocol [RFC6733] requires that each Diameter implementation use underlying security; i.e., TLS/TCP, DTLS/SCTP or IPsec. These mechanisms are believed to provide sufficient protection under the normal Internet threat model; that is, assuming that the authorized nodes engaging in the protocol have not been compromised, but that the attacker has complete control over the communication channels between them. This includes eavesdropping, message modification, insertion, and man-in-the-middle and replay attacks. Note also that this application includes a mechanism for application layer replay protection by means of the Session-Id from [RFC6733] and CC- Request-Number, which is specified in this document. The Diameter credit-control application is often used within one domain, and there may be a single hop between the peers. In these environments, the use of TLS/TCP, DTLS/SCTP or IPsec is sufficient. The details of TLS/TCP, DTLS/SCTP or IPsec related security considerations are discussed in the [RFC6733].
Because this application conveys past usage information (directly or indirectly), it increases the interest for various security attacks. Therefore, all parties communicating with each other MUST be authenticated, including, for instance, TLS client-side authentication. In addition, authorization of the client SHOULD be emphasized; i.e., that the client is allowed to perform credit- control for a certain user. The specific means of authorization are outside of the scope of this specification but can be, for instance, manual configuration.
The attributes provided by this solution MUST be assumed to be privacy sensitive by both the client and server.
| [RFC2119] | Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997. |
| [RFC4006] | Hakala, H., Mattila, L., Koskinen, J-P., Stura, M. and J. Loughney, "Diameter Credit-Control Application", RFC 4006, DOI 10.17487/RFC4006, August 2005. |
| [RFC6733] | Fajardo, V., Arkko, J., Loughney, J. and G. Zorn, "Diameter Base Protocol", RFC 6733, DOI 10.17487/RFC6733, October 2012. |
| [RFC7155] | Zorn, G., "Diameter Network Access Server Application", RFC 7155, DOI 10.17487/RFC7155, April 2014. |