Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)                   B. Briscoe, Ed.
Request for Comments: 6789                                            BT
Category: Informational                                   R. Woundy, Ed.
ISSN: 2070-1721                                                  Comcast
                                                         A. Cooper, Ed.
                                                                    CDT
                                                          December 2012


          Congestion Exposure (ConEx) Concepts and Use Cases

Abstract

  This document provides the entry point to the set of documentation
  about the Congestion Exposure (ConEx) protocol.  It explains the
  motivation for including a ConEx marking at the IP layer: to expose
  information about congestion to network nodes.  Although such
  information may have a number of uses, this document focuses on how
  the information communicated by the ConEx marking can serve as the
  basis for significantly more efficient and effective traffic
  management than what exists on the Internet today.

Status of This Memo

  This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
  published for informational purposes.

  This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
  (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
  received public review and has been approved for publication by the
  Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Not all documents
  approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
  Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

  Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
  and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
  http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6789.














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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.

Table of Contents

  1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
  2.  Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
    2.1.  Congestion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
    2.2.  Congestion-Volume  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
    2.3.  Rest-of-Path Congestion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
    2.4.  Definitions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
  3.  Core Use Case: Informing Traffic Management  . . . . . . . . .  7
    3.1.  Use Case Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
    3.2.  Additional Benefits  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
    3.3.  Comparison with Existing Approaches  . . . . . . . . . . .  9
  4.  Other Use Cases  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
  5.  Deployment Arrangements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
  6.  Experimental Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
  7.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
  8.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
  9.  Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
  10. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

1.  Introduction

  The power of Internet technology comes from multiplexing shared
  capacity with packets rather than circuits.  Network operators aim to
  provide sufficient shared capacity, but when too much packet load
  meets too little shared capacity, congestion results.  Congestion
  appears as either increased delay, dropped packets, or packets
  explicitly marked with Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
  markings [RFC3168].  As described in Figure 1, congestion control
  currently relies on the transport receiver detecting these
  'Congestion Signals' and informing the transport sender in
  'Congestion Feedback Signals'.  The sender is then expected to reduce
  its rate in response.



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  This document provides the entry point to the set of documentation
  about the Congestion Exposure (ConEx) protocol.  It focuses on the
  motivation for including a ConEx marking at the IP layer.  (A
  companion document, [CONEX-ABS], focuses on the mechanics of the
  protocol.)  Briefly, the idea is for the sender to continually signal
  expected congestion in the headers of any data it sends.  To a first
  approximation, the sender does this by relaying the 'Congestion
  Feedback Signals' back into the IP layer.  They then travel unchanged
  across the network to the receiver (shown as 'IP-Layer-ConEx-Signals'
  in Figure 1).  This enables IP-layer devices on the path to see
  information about the whole-path congestion.

  ,---------.                                               ,---------.
  |Transport|                                               |Transport|
  | Sender  |   .                                           |Receiver |
  |         |  /|___________________________________________|         |
  |     ,-<---------------Congestion-Feedback-Signals--<--------.     |
  |     |   |/                                              |   |     |
  |     |   |\           Transport Layer Feedback Flow      |   |     |
  |     |   | \  ___________________________________________|   |     |
  |     |   |  \|                                           |   |     |
  |     |   |   '         ,-----------.               .     |   |     |
  |     |   |_____________|           |_______________|\    |   |     |
  |     |   |    IP Layer |           |  Data Flow      \   |   |     |
  |     |   |             |(Congested)|                  \  |   |     |
  |     |   |             |  Network  |--Congestion-Signals--->-'     |
  |     |   |             |  Device   |                    \|         |
  |     |   |             |           |                    /|         |
  |     `----------->--(new)-IP-Layer-ConEx-Signals-------->|         |
  |         |             |           |                  /  |         |
  |         |_____________|           |_______________  /   |         |
  |         |             |           |               |/    |         |
  `---------'             `-----------'               '     `---------'

        Figure 1: The ConEx Protocol in the Internet Architecture

  One of the key benefits of exposing this congestion information at
  the IP layer is that it makes the information available to network
  operators for use as input into their traffic management procedures.
  A ConEx-enabled sender signals expected whole-path congestion, which
  is approximately the congestion at least a round-trip time earlier as
  reported by the receiver to the sender (Figure 1).  The ConEx signal
  is a mark in the IP header that is easy for any IP device to read.
  Therefore, a node performing traffic management can count congestion
  as easily as it might count data volume today by simply counting the
  volume of packets with ConEx markings.





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  ConEx-based traffic management can make highly efficient use of
  capacity.  In times of no congestion, all traffic management
  restraints can be removed, leaving the network's full capacity
  available to all its users.  If some users on the network cause
  disproportionate congestion, the traffic management function can
  learn about this and directly limit those users' traffic in order to
  protect the service of other users sharing the same capacity.  ConEx-
  based traffic management thus presents a step change in terms of the
  options available to network operators for managing traffic on their
  networks.

  The remainder of this document explains the concepts behind ConEx and
  how exposing congestion can significantly improve Internet traffic
  management, among other benefits.  Section 2 introduces a number of
  concepts that are fundamental to understanding how ConEx-based
  traffic management works.  Section 3 shows how ConEx can be used for
  traffic management, discusses additional benefits from such usage,
  and compares ConEx-based traffic management to existing traffic
  management approaches.  Section 4 discusses other related use cases.
  Section 5 briefly discusses deployment arrangements.  Section 6
  suggests open issues that experiments in the use of ConEx could
  usefully be designed to answer.  The final sections are standard RFC
  back matter.

  The remainder of the core ConEx document suite consists of:

     [CONEX-ABS], which provides an abstract encoding of ConEx signals,
     explains the ConEx audit and security mechanisms, and describes
     incremental deployment features;

     [CONEX-DESTOPT], which specifies the IPv6 destination option
     encoding for ConEx;

     [TCP-MOD], which specifies TCP-sender modifications for use of
     ConEx;

     and the following documents, which describe some feasible
     scenarios for deploying ConEx:

        [CONEX-DEPLOY], which describes a scenario around a fixed
        broadband access network;

        [CONEX-MOBILE], which describes a scenario around a mobile
        communications provider;

        [CONEX-DATA], which describes how ConEx could be used for
        performance isolation between tenants of a data centre.




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2.  Concepts

  ConEx relies on a precise definition of congestion and a number of
  newer concepts that are introduced in this section.  Definitions are
  summarized in Section 2.4.

2.1.  Congestion

  Despite its central role in network control and management,
  congestion is a remarkably difficult concept to define.  Experts in
  different disciplines and with different perspectives define
  congestion in a variety of ways [Bauer09].

  The definition used for the purposes of ConEx is expressed as the
  probability of packet loss (or the probability of packet marking if
  ECN is in use).  This definition focuses on how congestion is
  measured, rather than describing congestion as a condition or state.

2.2.  Congestion-Volume

  The metric that ConEx exposes is congestion-volume: the volume of
  bytes dropped or ECN-marked in a given period of time.  Counting
  congestion-volume allows each user to be held responsible for his or
  her contribution to congestion.  Congestion-volume can only be a
  property of traffic, whereas congestion can be a property of traffic
  or a property of a link or a path.

  To understand congestion-volume, consider a simple example.  Imagine
  Alice sends 1 GB of a file while the loss-probability is a constant
  0.2%.  Her contribution to congestion -- her congestion-volume -- is
  1 GB x 0.2% = 2 MB.  If she then sends another 3 GB of the file while
  the loss-probability is 0.1%, this adds 3 MB to her congestion-
  volume.  Her total contribution to congestion is then 2 MB + 3 MB = 5
  MB.

  Fortunately, measuring Alice's congestion-volume on a real network
  does not require the kind of arithmetic shown above, because
  congestion-volume can be directly measured by counting the total
  volume of Alice's traffic that gets discarded or ECN-marked.  (A
  queue with varying percentage loss does these multiplications and
  additions inherently.)  With ConEx, network operators can count
  congestion-volume using techniques very similar to those they use for
  counting volume.








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2.3.  Rest-of-Path Congestion

  At a particular measurement point within a network, "rest-of-path
  congestion" (also known as "downstream congestion") is the level of
  congestion that a traffic flow is expected to experience between the
  measurement point and its final destination.  "Upstream congestion"
  is the congestion experienced up to the measurement point.

  If traffic is ECN-capable, ECN signals monitored in the middle of a
  network will indicate the congestion experienced so far on the path
  (upstream congestion).  In contrast, the ConEx signals inserted into
  IP headers as shown in Figure 1 indicate the congestion along a whole
  path from transport source to transport destination.  Therefore, if a
  measurement point detects both of these signals, it can subtract the
  level of ECN (upstream congestion) from the level of ConEx (whole
  path) to derive a measure of the congestion that packets are likely
  to experience between the monitoring point and their destination
  (rest-of-path congestion).  A measurement point can calculate this
  measurement in the aggregate, across all flows.

  A network monitor can usually accurately measure upstream congestion
  only if the traffic it observes is ECN-capable.  [CONEX-ABS] further
  discusses the constraints around the network's ability to measure
  upstream and rest-of-path congestion in these circumstances.
  However, there are a number of initial deployment arrangements that
  benefit from ConEx but work without ECN (see Section 5).

2.4.  Definitions

  Congestion:  In general, congestion occurs when any user's traffic
     suffers loss, ECN marking, or increased delay as a result of one
     or more network resources becoming overloaded.  For the purposes
     of ConEx, congestion is measured using the concrete signals
     provided by loss and ECN markings (delay is not considered).
     Congestion is measured as the probability of loss or the
     probability of ECN marking, usually expressed as a dimensionless
     percentage.

  Congestion-volume:  For any granularity of traffic (packet, flow,
     aggregate, link, etc.), the volume of bytes dropped or ECN-marked
     in a given period of time.  Conceptually, data volume multiplied
     by the congestion each packet of the volume experienced.  This is
     usually expressed in bytes (or kB, MB, etc.).

  Congestion policer:  A logical entity that allows a network operator
     to monitor each user's congestion-volume and enforce congestion-
     volume limits (discussed in Section 3.1).




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  Rest-of-path congestion (or downstream congestion):  The congestion a
     flow of traffic is expected to experience on the remainder of its
     path.  In other words, at a measurement point in the network, the
     rest-of-path congestion is the congestion the traffic flow has yet
     to experience as it travels from that point to the receiver.
     Upstream congestion is usually expressed as a dimensionless
     percentage.

  Upstream congestion:  The accumulated congestion experienced by a
     traffic flow thus far, relative to a point along its path.  In
     other words, at a measurement point in the network, the upstream
     congestion is the accumulated 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.  This is usually
     expressed as a dimensionless percentage.

  Network operator (or provider):  Operator of a residential,
     commercial, enterprise, campus, or other network.

  User:  The contractual entity that represents an individual,
     household, business, or institution that uses the service of a
     network operator.  There is no implication that the contract has
     to be commercial; for instance, the users of a university or
     enterprise network service could be students or employees who do
     not pay for access, but may be required to comply with some form
     of contract or acceptable use policy.  There is also no
     implication that every user is an end user.  Where two networks
     form a customer-provider relationship, the term "user" applies to
     the customer network.

  [CONEX-ABS] gives further definitions for aspects of ConEx related to
  protocol mechanisms.

3.  Core Use Case: Informing Traffic Management

  This section explains how ConEx could be used as the basis for
  traffic management, highlights additional benefits derived from
  having ConEx-aware nodes on the network, and compares ConEx-based
  traffic management to existing approaches.

3.1.  Use Case Description

  One of the key benefits that ConEx can deliver is in helping network
  operators to improve how they manage traffic on their networks.
  Consider the common case of a commercial broadband network where a
  relatively small number of users place disproportionate demand on
  network resources, at times resulting in congestion.  The network



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  operator seeks a way to manage traffic such that the traffic that
  contributes more to congestion bears more of the brunt of the
  management.

  Assuming ConEx signals are visible at the IP layer, the network
  operator can accomplish this by placing a congestion policer at an
  enforcement point within the network and configuring it with a
  traffic management policy that monitors each user's contribution to
  congestion.  As described in [CONEX-ABS] and elaborated in [CongPol],
  one way to implement a congestion policer is in a similar way to a
  bit-rate policer, except that it monitors congestion-volume (based on
  IP-layer ConEx signals) rather than bit rate.  When implemented as a
  token bucket, the tokens provide users with the right to cause bits
  of congestion-volume, rather than to send bits of data volume.  The
  fill rate represents each user's congestion-volume quota.

  The congestion policer monitors the ConEx signals of the traffic
  entering the network.  As long as the network remains uncongested and
  users stay within their quotas, no action is taken.  When the network
  becomes congested and a user exhausts his quota, some action is taken
  against the traffic that breached the quota in accordance with the
  network operator's traffic management policy.  For example, the
  traffic may be dropped, delayed, or marked with a lower QoS class.
  In this way, traffic is managed according to its contribution to
  congestion -- not some application- or flow-specific policy -- and is
  not managed at all during times of no congestion.

  As an example of how a network operator might employ a ConEx-based
  traffic management system, consider a typical DSL network
  architecture (as elaborated in [TR-059] and [TR-101]).  Traffic is
  routed from regional and global IP networks to an operator-controlled
  IP node, the Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS).  From the BRAS,
  traffic is delivered to access nodes.  The BRAS carries enhanced
  functionality, including IP QoS and traffic management capabilities.

  By deploying a congestion policer at the BRAS location, the network
  operator can measure the congestion-volume created by users within
  the access nodes and police misbehaving users before their traffic
  affects others on the access network.  The policer would be
  provisioned with a traffic management policy, perhaps directing the
  BRAS to drop packets from users that exceed their congestion-volume
  quotas during times of congestion.  Those users' apps would be likely
  to react in the typical way to drops, backing off (assuming at least
  some use TCP), and thereby lowering the users' congestion-volumes
  back within the quota limits.  If none of a user's apps responds, the
  policer would continue to increase focused drops and effectively
  enforce its own congestion control.




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3.2.  Additional Benefits

  The ConEx-based approach to traffic management has a number of
  benefits in addition to efficient management of traffic.  It provides
  incentives for users to make use of "scavenger" transport protocols,
  such as the Low Extra Delay Background Transport [LEDBAT], that
  provide ways for bulk-transfer applications to rapidly yield when
  interactive applications require capacity (thereby "scavenging"
  remaining bandwidth).  With a congestion policer in place as
  described in Section 3.1, users of these protocols will be less
  likely to run afoul of the network operator's traffic management
  policy than those whose bulk-transfer applications generate the same
  volume of traffic without being sensitive to congestion.  In short,
  two users who produce similar traffic volumes over the same time
  interval may produce different congestion-volumes if one of them is
  using a scavenger transport protocol and the other is not; in that
  situation, the scavenger user's traffic is less likely to be managed
  by the network operator.

  ConEx-based traffic management also makes it possible for a user to
  control the relative performance among its own traffic flows.  If a
  user wants some flows to have more bandwidth than others, it can
  reduce the rate of some traffic so that it consumes less congestion-
  volume "budget", leaving more congestion-volume "budget" for the user
  to "spend" on making other traffic go faster.  This approach is most
  relevant if congestion is signalled by ECN, because no impairment due
  to loss is involved and delay can remain low.

3.3.  Comparison with Existing Approaches

  A variety of approaches already exist for network operators to manage
  congestion, traffic, and the disproportionate usage of scarce
  capacity by a small number of users.  Common approaches can be
  categorized as rate-based, volume-based, or application-based.

  Rate-based approaches constrain the traffic rate per user or per
  network.  A user's peak and average (or "committed") rate may be
  limited.  These approaches have the potential to either over- or
  under-constrain the network, suppressing rates even when the network
  is uncongested or not suppressing them enough during heavy usage
  periods.

  Round-robin scheduling and fair queuing were developed to address
  these problems.  They equalize relative rates between active users
  (or flows) at a known bottleneck.  The bit rate allocated to any one
  user depends on the number of active users at each instant.  The
  drawback of these approaches is that they favor heavy users over
  light users over time, because they do not have any memory of usage.



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  These approaches share bit rate instant by instant; however, heavy
  users are active at every instant, whereas light users only occupy
  their share of the link occasionally.

  Volume-based approaches measure the overall volume of traffic a user
  sends (and/or receives) over time.  Users may be subject to an
  absolute volume cap (for example, 10GB per month) or the "heaviest"
  users may be sanctioned in some other manner.  Many providers use
  monthly volume limits, and count volume regardless of whether the
  network is congested or not, creating the potential for over- or
  under-constraining problems, as with the original rate-based
  approaches.

  ConEx-based approaches, by comparison, only react during times of
  congestion and in proportion to each user's congestion contribution,
  making more efficient use of capacity and more proportionate
  management decisions.

  Unlike ConEx-based approaches, neither rate-based nor volume-based
  approaches provide incentives for applications to use scavenger
  transport protocols.  They may even penalize users of applications
  that employ scavenger transports for the large amount of volume they
  send, rather than rewarding them for carefully avoiding congestion
  while sending it.  While the volume-based approach described in
  "Comcast's Protocol-Agnostic Congestion Management System" [RFC6057]
  aims to overcome the over-/under-constraining problem by only
  measuring volume and triggering traffic management action during
  periods of high utilization, it still does not provide incentives to
  use scavenger transports, because congestion-causing volume cannot be
  distinguished from volume overall.  ConEx provides this ability.

  Application-based approaches use deep packet inspection or other
  techniques to determine what application a given traffic flow is
  associated with.  Network operators may then use this information to
  rate-limit or otherwise sanction certain applications, in some cases
  only during peak hours.  These approaches suffer from being at odds
  with IPsec and some application-layer encryption, and they may raise
  additional policy concerns.  In contrast, ConEx offers an
  application-agnostic metric to serve as the basis for traffic
  management decisions.

  The existing types of approaches share a further limitation that
  ConEx can help to overcome: 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



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  connections is being altered or degraded based on how the network
  operator is attempting to manage congestion.  By exposing congestion
  information at the IP layer, ConEx instead provides a metric that can
  serve as an open, transparent basis for traffic management policies
  that both providers and their customers can measure and verify.  It
  can be used to reduce the performance uncertainty that some users
  currently experience, without having to sacrifice their billing
  certainty.

4.  Other Use Cases

  ConEx information can be put to a number of uses other than informing
  traffic management.  These include:

  Informing inter-operator contracts:  ConEx information is made
     visible to every IP node, including border nodes between networks.
     Network operators can use ConEx combined with ECN markings to
     measure how much traffic from each network contributes to
     congestion in the other.  As such, congestion-volume could be
     included as a metric in inter-operator contracts, just as volume
     or bit rate are included today.  This would not be an initial
     deployment scenario, unless ECN became widely deployed.

  Enabling more efficient capacity provisioning:  Section 3.2 explains
     how operators can use ConEx-based traffic management to encourage
     use of scavenger transport protocols, which significantly improves
     the performance of interactive applications while still allowing
     heavy users to transfer high volumes.  Here we explain how this
     can also benefit network operators.

     Today, when loss, delay, or average utilization exceeds a certain
     threshold, some operators just buy more capacity without
     attempting to manage the traffic.  Other operators prefer to limit
     a minority of heavy users at peak times, but they still eventually
     buy more capacity when utilization rises.

     With ConEx-based traffic management, a network operator should be
     able to provision capacity more efficiently.  An operator could
     benefit from this in a variety of ways.  For example, the operator
     could add capacity as it would do without ConEx, but deliver
     better quality of service for its users.  Or, the operator could
     delay adding capacity while delivering similar quality of service
     to what it currently provides.








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RFC 6789              ConEx Concepts and Use Cases         December 2012


5.  Deployment Arrangements

  ConEx is designed so that it can be incrementally deployed in the
  Internet and still be valuable for early adopters.  As long as some
  senders are ConEx-enabled, a network on the path can unilaterally use
  ConEx-aware policy devices for traffic management; no changes to
  network forwarding elements are needed, and ConEx still works if
  there are other networks on the path that are unaware of ConEx marks.

  The above two steps seem to represent a stand-off where neither step
  is useful until the other has made the first move: i) some sending
  hosts must be modified to give information to the network, and ii) a
  network must deploy policy devices to monitor this information and
  act on it.  Nonetheless, the developer of a scavenger transport
  protocol like LEDBAT does stand to benefit from deploying ConEx.  In
  this case, the developer makes the first move, expecting it will
  prompt at least some networks to move in response, using the ConEx
  information to reward users of the scavenger transport protocol.

  On the host side, we have already shown (Figure 1) how the sender
  piggy-backs ConEx signals on normal data packets to re-insert
  feedback about packet drops (and/or ECN) back into the IP layer.  In
  the case of TCP, [TCP-MOD] proposes the required sender
  modifications.  ConEx works with any TCP receiver as long as it uses
  SACK (selective acknowledgment), which most do.  There is a receiver
  optimisation [TCPM-ECN] that improves ConEx precision when using ECN,
  but ConEx can still use ECN without it.  Networks can make use of
  ConEx even if the implementations of some of the transport protocols
  on a host do not support ConEx (e.g., the implementation of DNS over
  UDP might not support ConEx, while perhaps RTP over UDP and TCP
  will).

  On the network side, the provider solely needs to place ConEx
  congestion policers at each ingress to its network in a similar
  arrangement to the edge-policed architecture of Diffserv [RFC2475].

  A sender can choose whether to send packets that support ConEx or
  packets that don't.  ConEx-enabled packets bring information to the
  policer about congestion expected on the rest of the path beyond the
  policer.  Packets that do not support ConEx bring no such
  information.  Therefore, the network will tend to conservatively
  rate-limit non-ConEx-enabled packets in order to manage the unknown
  risk of congestion.  In contrast, a network doesn't normally need to
  rate-limit ConEx-enabled packets unless they reveal a persistently
  high contribution to congestion.  This natural tendency for networks
  to favour senders that provide ConEx information reinforces ConEx
  deployment.




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  Feasible initial deployment scenarios exist for a broadband access
  network [CONEX-DEPLOY], a mobile communications network
  [CONEX-MOBILE], and a multi-tenant data centre [CONEX-DATA].  The
  first two of these scenarios are believed to work well without ECN
  support, while the data center scenario works best with ECN (and ECN
  can be deployed unilaterally).

  The above gives only the most salient aspects of ConEx deployment.
  For further detail, [CONEX-ABS] describes the incremental deployment
  features of the ConEx protocol and the components that need to be
  deployed for ConEx to work.

6.  Experimental Considerations

  ConEx is initially designed as an experimental protocol because it
  makes an ambitious change at the interoperability (IP) layer, so no
  amount of careful design can foresee all the potential feature
  interactions with other uses of IP.  This section identifies a number
  of questions that would be useful to answer through well-designed
  experiments:

  o  Are the compromises that were made in order to fit the ConEx
     encoding into IP (for example, that the initial design was solely
     for IPv6 and not for IPv4, and that the encoding has limited
     visibility when tunnelled [CONEX-DESTOPT]) the right ones?

  o  Is it possible to combine techniques for distinguishing self-
     congestion from shared congestion with ConEx-based traffic
     management such that users are not penalized for congestion that
     does not impact others on the network?  Are other techniques
     needed?

  o  In practice, how does traffic management using ConEx compare with
     traditional techniques (Section 3.3)?  Does it give the benefits
     claimed in Sections 3.1 and 3.2?

  o  Approaches are proposed for congestion policing of ConEx traffic
     alongside existing management (or lack thereof) of non-ConEx
     traffic, including UDP traffic [CONEX-ABS].  Are they strategy-
     proof against users selectively using both?  Are there better
     transition strategies?

  o  Audit devices have been designed and implemented to assure ConEx
     signal integrity [CONEX-ABS].  Do they achieve minimal false hits
     and false misses in a wide range of traffic scenarios?  Are there
     new attacks?  Are there better audit designs to defend against
     these?




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  o  If ECN deployment remains patchy, are the proposed initial ConEx
     deployment scenarios (Section 5) still useful enough to kick-start
     deployment?  Is auditing effective when based on loss at a primary
     bottleneck?  Can rest-of-path congestion be approximated
     accurately enough without ECN?  Are there other useful deployment
     scenarios?

  ConEx is intended to be a generative technology that might be used
  for unexpected purposes unforeseen by the designers.  Therefore, this
  list of experimental considerations is not intended to be exhaustive.

7.  Security Considerations

  This document does not specify a mechanism, it merely motivates
  congestion exposure at the IP layer.  Therefore, security
  considerations are described in the companion document that gives an
  abstract description of the ConEx protocol and the components that
  would use it [CONEX-ABS].

8.  Acknowledgments

  Bob Briscoe was 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.

  The authors would like to thank the many people that have commented
  on this document: Bernard Aboba, Mikael Abrahamsson, Joao Taveira
  Araujo, Marcelo Bagnulo Braun, Steve Bauer, Caitlin Bestler, Steven
  Blake, Louise Burness, Ken Carlberg, Nandita Dukkipati, Dave McDysan,
  Wes Eddy, Matthew Ford, Ingemar Johansson, Georgios Karagiannis,
  Mirja Kuehlewind, Dirk Kutscher, Zhu Lei, Kevin Mason, Matt Mathis,
  Michael Menth, Chris Morrow, Tim Shepard, Hannes Tschofenig, and
  Stuart Venters.  Please accept our apologies if your name has been
  missed off this list.
















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RFC 6789              ConEx Concepts and Use Cases         December 2012


9.  Contributors

  Philip Eardley and Andrea Soppera made helpful text contributions to
  this document.

  The following co-edited this document through most of its life:

     Toby Moncaster
     Computer Laboratory
     William Gates Building
     JJ Thomson Avenue
     Cambridge, CB3 0FD
     UK
     EMail: [email protected]

     John Leslie
     JLC.net
     10 Souhegan Street
     Milford, NH  03055
     US
     EMail: [email protected]

10.  Informative References

  [Bauer09]       Bauer, S., Clark, D., and W. Lehr, "The Evolution of
                  Internet Congestion", 2009.

  [CONEX-ABS]     Mathis, M. and B. Briscoe, "Congestion Exposure
                  (ConEx) Concepts and Abstract Mechanism", Work
                  in Progress, October 2012.

  [CONEX-DATA]    Briscoe, B. and M. Sridharan, "Network Performance
                  Isolation in Data Centres using Congestion Exposure
                  (ConEx)", Work in Progress, July 2012.

  [CONEX-DEPLOY]  Briscoe, B., "Initial Congestion Exposure (ConEx)
                  Deployment Examples", Work in Progress, July 2012.

  [CONEX-DESTOPT] Krishnan, S., Kuehlewind, M., and C. Ucendo, "IPv6
                  Destination Option for ConEx", Work in Progress,
                  September 2012.

  [CONEX-MOBILE]  Kutscher, D., Mir, F., Winter, R., Krishnan, S.,
                  Zhang, Y., and C. Bernardos, "Mobile Communication
                  Congestion Exposure Scenario", Work in Progress,
                  July 2012.





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RFC 6789              ConEx Concepts and Use Cases         December 2012


  [CongPol]       Briscoe, B., Jacquet, A., and T. Moncaster, "Policing
                  Freedom to Use the Internet Resource Pool", ReArch
                  2008 hosted at the 2008 CoNEXT conference ,
                  December 2008.

  [LEDBAT]        Shalunov, S., Hazel, G., Iyengar, J., and M.
                  Kuehlewind, "Low Extra Delay Background Transport
                  (LEDBAT)", Work in Progress, September 2012.

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

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

  [RFC6057]       Bastian, C., Klieber, T., Livingood, J., Mills, J.,
                  and R. Woundy, "Comcast's Protocol-Agnostic
                  Congestion Management System", RFC 6057,
                  December 2010.

  [TCP-MOD]       Kuehlewind, M. and R. Scheffenegger, "TCP
                  modifications for Congestion Exposure", Work
                  in Progress, May 2012.

  [TCPM-ECN]      Kuehlewind, M. and R. Scheffenegger, "More Accurate
                  ECN Feedback in TCP", Work in Progress, July 2012.

  [TR-059]        Anschutz, T., Ed., "DSL Forum Technical Report
                  TR-059: Requirements for the Support of QoS-Enabled
                  IP Services", September 2003.

  [TR-101]        Cohen, A., Ed. and E. Schrum, Ed., "DSL Forum
                  Technical Report TR-101: Migration to Ethernet-Based
                  DSL Aggregation", April 2006.















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RFC 6789              ConEx Concepts and Use Cases         December 2012


Authors' Addresses

  Bob Briscoe (editor)
  BT
  B54/77, Adastral Park
  Martlesham Heath
  Ipswich  IP5 3RE
  UK

  Phone: +44 1473 645196
  EMail: [email protected]
  URI:   http://bobbriscoe.net/


  Richard Woundy (editor)
  Comcast
  1701 John F Kennedy Boulevard
  Philadelphia, PA  19103
  US

  EMail: [email protected]
  URI:   http://www.comcast.com


  Alissa Cooper (editor)
  CDT
  1634 Eye St. NW, Suite 1100
  Washington, DC  20006
  US

  EMail: [email protected]




















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