Internet Congestion Control Research Group M. Mathis
Internet-Draft Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Intended status: Informational January 27, 2012
Expires: July 28, 2012

Rethinking TCP Friendly
draft-mathis-iccrg-unfriendly-00

Abstract

The current Internet fairness paradigm mandates that all protocols have equivalent response to packet loss, such that relatively simple network devices can attain a weak form of fairness by sending uniform signals to all flows. This "TCP-friendly" paradigm has been the policy of the IETF for nearly two decades. Although it was only an informal policy in the beginning, it progressively became more formal following the publication of RFC 2001 in 1997.

However we observe two trends that differ from this policy: an increasing number of environments where applications and other circumstances create situations that are "unfair", and ISPs that are responding to these situation by imposing traffic control in the network itself.

This note explores the question of whether TCP-friendly paradigm is still appropriate for the huge breadth of technology and scale encompassed by today's global Internet. It considers the merits and difficulties of changing IETF policy to embrace these changes by progressively moving the responsibility for capacity allocation from the end-system to the network. Ultimately this policy change might eliminate or redefine the requirement that all protocols be "TCP-Friendly".

This note is intended foster discussion in the community and eventually become input to the IESG and IAB, where it might evolve into a future architecture statement.

Status of this Memo

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 July 28, 2012.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2012 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.

1. Parable

We have built a global village, with no explicit traffic control, no stop lights or stop signs, only implicit yield signs at every intersection. This works, because for the most part we have carefully trained the traffic to have a calibrated sense of fairness, and to take turns at all bottlenecks. This approach was optimal when the Internet was a club of friends, who believed in serving the common good.

Now that the Internet has become truly global, encompassing all of the best and worst of mankind, it is not too surprising that we are finding that we need traffic control. Furthermore, there are more and more situations where the "one-size-fits-all" approach to congestion control doesn't work well enough. In some parts of the world the infrastructure is under utilized because the prescribed fairness makes the traffic too timid to effectively fill the available capacity, either due to adverse conditions along the path or due to the scale of the available capacity. In addition, in some contexts the users or applications are simply being greedy, without regard to their impact on others.

If we embrace traffic controls, then we can permit traffic to be less timid, which will eventually raise overall network utilization and efficiency.

1.1. [[Instructions to contributors

Everyone is welcome to contribute! Be especially careful to note any issues that I may have overlooked. Our goal is to be complete as possible, covering the potential good, bad and ugly consequences of changing the TCP-friendly paradigm.

Please use the ICCRG list for discussion: iccrg@cs.ucl.ac.uk. If you have simple document additions or fixes you can send them directly to me at mathis@psc.edu.

Word counts are only advisory (none yet). An RFC page is about 400 words.

Ellipsis (...) indicate text still needing to be written. Generally a sentience fragment ending with ellipsis is likely to become a full paragraph, if not more.

Text in double square brackets, such as this entire section, are notes to authors and will be removed prior to being submitted for RFC publication.

Additional author information and document revision history will be posted on a document management page at http://staff.psc.edu/mathis/unfriendly/drafts/

]]

2. Introduction

The current Internet fairness model is based on separate principles.....

First, that bottlenecks can send "independent signals" (drops or marks) to all flows....

Second, that all protocols and application have "uniform response" to these .....

Third, that the congestion response has to be "AIMD like".....

This paradigm approximates "window fairness" [CJ89 - Chiu and Jain, Analysis of AIMD for Congestion Control...]

Our position is that we should consider explicitly inverting the first principle: require that the network be able to isolate flows and send different congestion signals to each, according to some explicit capacity allocation mechanism.

As the network progressively takes on more responsibility for capacity allocation, we can progressively relax both of the other assumptions.... which can solve a number of other long standing problems...

Section 3 describes some of the problems with the current paradigm....

Section 4 describes some of the problems that need to be overcome to implement the new paradigm....

Section 5 describes a plausible path forward....

3. Reasons to Change the TCP-friendly paradigm

The motivation to change the Internet fairness model comes from a number problems with the current model. They fall into two broad categories: situations where the Internet fails to attain a reasonable definition of fair, and scaling problems associated with the AIMD algorithm itself. These are discussed seperatly in sections Section 3.1 and Section 3.2 respectively.

3.1. TCP-friendly isn't fair enough

The current Internet fairness model is based on the assumption that fairness can be achieved by sending independent signals to different flows. This assumption fails in a number of very common situations in todays internet. Part of the difficulty is that "fairness" itself is sometimes subjective in the sense that what is fair from one point of view may be quite unfair from other points of view. However, in many situations the Internet fairness model fails to attain fairness by any definition of fairness.

[[Consider pulling additional examples and text from draft-briscoe-tsvwg-relax-fairness-01.txt..]]

3.1.1. Multiple Connections

Applications that open many connections...

3.1.2. Non-standard protocols

Non-IETF protocols (typically UDP based) that don't try to be fair...

3.1.3. Drop-tail queues

Lockout and other problems with drop tail queues, as documented in RFC 2309 [RFC2309]...

3.1.4. Wildy Different Round Trip Times

If the RTTs are very different then window fair becomes egregiously rate unfair...

3.1.5. Instantaneous and Average Fairness

The distinction between instantaneous and average fairness...

3.2. AIMD is not suitable for the entire Internet

The current TCP-friendly model assumes that the AIMD algorithm is suitable for all parts of the Internet.....

AMID performance goes as 1/sqrt(p) [[Review math, including E(loss), E(period)]].....

These are problems that follow from AIMD....

3.2.1. AIMD requires excessivly small loss rates

Wireless and LFNs requires excessively small loss....... (cite work)

3.2.2. Long convergence times

LFNs require extremely long convergence time...... (Mention S. Low scalability work)

3.2.3. A new standard congestion control?

Note that we might pick a new reference congestion control algorithm to replace AIMD. This would require breaking all three fairness principles during a transition, but would asymptotically reestablish the second principle that protocols have uniform response to congestion signals.

Such an approach would mitigate a number of the problems discussed int Section 4, however it requires reestablishing a new standard one-size-fits-all congestion algorithm. Given the likely extended debate to come to consensus on such a standard and the very long deployment cycle, we take the position that the transition itself should be viewed as the long term steady state, with diverse congestion control algorithms co-existing in the operational Internet.

This in not to say that a new, better standard congestion control might not emerge in the future, but it is a not a goal at this time.

3.2.4. No provider input

Providers want to be able to make business policy re-traffic....

Are moving away from "independent signals" anyhow...

We are not proposing to break net neutrality...

[[This entire section may belong elsewhere]]

4. Difficulties to be Overcome

Reasons not to change and/or problems we must solve first....

4.1. The Transition

Must avoid new CC into old bottlenecks...

4.2. Risk of Congestion Collapse

TCP-friendly was used as a proxy for preventing congestion collapse. We need new methods for assuring that protocols are not subject to congestion collapse....

4.3. Loss of Appropriate Economic Incentives

Current TCP provides window fair....

Current network based techniques are likely enforce rate fair....

...causes loss of incentive for traffic locality....

No incentive for CDN and other techniques for content providers to move data closer to clients ...

No incentives for clients to choose close data.... No incentives for ALTO...

4.4. Loss of Implicit Fairness

Even if it the existing models only provide weak fairness, there are many situations where this is important...

In particular the independent congestion signal assumption does not depend on flow classification. The new paradigm requires explicit flow classification. If the flow granularity is too large (more than one concurrent micro-flow), then we would like to have implicit fairness within the large flow. This requires uniform congestion response within the larger flow, but does not require that the individual micro-flows have AIMD like response...

4.5. Scale Limitations

We do not know if the Internet core will be protected well enough from congestion....

It has been observed that congestion at the edges tends to protect the core...

AFD works at very large scale, but is it large enough....

4.6. Our Research May be off Base

Much CC research has been influenced by one of more of the assumptions underlying TCP-Friendly. If we abandon TCP-Friendly, then some large portion of past research may no longer be relevant.....

4.7. Many IETF Standards may need to be revised

Roughly a half dozen have definitional language about TCP-Friendly and TCP-Friendly Rate Control.

Roughly 60 RFC contain references to TCP-Friendly.

5. A Plausable Path Forward

[[TBD. Don't start yet.]]

6. Security Considerations

Traffic controls in the network can only improve the overall protection from DDoS.....

7. References

[1] Braden, B., Clark, D.D., Crowcroft, J., Davie, B., Deering, S., Estrin, D., Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Minshall, G., Partridge, C., Peterson, L., Ramakrishnan, K.K., Shenker, S., Wroclawski, J. and L. Zhang, "Recommendations on Queue Management and Congestion Avoidance in the Internet", RFC 2309, April 1998.

Appendix A. Acknowledgments

Thank you everyone...

Author's Address

Matthew Mathis Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center 300 S. Craig St. Pittsburgh, PA 15213 EMail: mathis@psc.edu

Table of Contents