Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) F. Baker

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) F. Baker
Request for Comments: 5865 J. Polk
Updates: 4542, 4594 Cisco Systems
Category: Standards Track M. Dolly
ISSN: 2070-1721 AT&T Labs
May 2010

A Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP)
for Capacity-Admitted Traffic

Abstract

This document requests one Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP)
from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for a class of
real-time traffic. This traffic class conforms to the Expedited
Forwarding Per-Hop Behavior. This traffic is also admitted by the
network using a Call Admission Control (CAC) procedure involving
authentication, authorization, and capacity admission. This differs
from a real-time traffic class that conforms to the Expedited
Forwarding Per-Hop Behavior but is not subject to capacity admission
or subject to very coarse capacity admission.

Status of This Memo

This is an Internet Standards Track document.

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). Further information on
Internet Standards is available in 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/rfc5865.

Baker, et al. Standards Track [Page 1]

RFC 5865 DSCP for Capacity-Admitted Traffic May 2010

Copyright Notice

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2. Candidate Implementations of the Admitted Telephony
Service Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1. Potential implementations of EF in this model . . . . . . 7
2.2. Capacity admission control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.3. Recommendations on implementation of an Admitted
Telephony Service Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3. Summary: changes from RFC 4594 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Baker, et al. Standards Track [Page 2]

RFC 5865 DSCP for Capacity-Admitted Traffic May 2010

1. Introduction

This document requests one Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP)
from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for a class of
real-time traffic. This class conforms to the Expedited Forwarding
(EF) [RFC3246] [RFC3247] Per-Hop Behavior. It is also admitted using
a CAC procedure involving authentication, authorization, and capacity
admission. This differs from a real-time traffic class that conforms
to the Expedited Forwarding Per-Hop Behavior but is not subject to
capacity admission or subject to very coarse capacity admission.

In addition, this document recommends that certain classes of video
described in [RFC4594] be treated as requiring capacity admission.

Real-time traffic flows have one or more potential congestion points
between the endpoints. Reserving capacity for these flows is
important to application performance. All of these applications have
low tolerance to jitter (aka delay variation) and loss, as summarized
in Section 2, and most (except for multimedia conferencing) have
inelastic flow behavior from Figure 1 of [RFC4594]. Inelastic flow
behavior and low jitter/loss tolerance are the service
characteristics that define the need for admission control behavior.

One of the reasons behind the requirement for capacity admission is
the need for classes of traffic that are handled under special
policies. Service providers need to distinguish between special-
policy traffic and other classes, particularly the existing Voice
over IP (VoIP) services that perform no capacity admission or only
very coarse capacity admission and can exceed their allocated
resources.

The requested DSCP applies to the Telephony Service Class described
in [RFC4594].

Since video classes have not had the history of mixing admitted and
non-admitted traffic in the same Per-Hop Behavior (PHB) as has
occurred for EF, an additional DSCP code point is not recommended
within this document for video. Instead, the recommended "best
practice" is to perform admission control for all traffic in three of
the video classes from [RFC4594]:

o The Interactive Real-Time Traffic (CS4, used for Video
conferencing and Interactive gaming),

o The Broadcast TV (CS3) for use in a video on demand context, and

o The AF4 Multimedia Conferencing (video conferencing).

Baker, et al. Standards Track [Page 3]

RFC 5865 DSCP for Capacity-Admitted Traffic May 2010

Other video classes are believed not to have the current problem of
confusion with unadmitted traffic and therefore would not benefit
from the notion of a separate DSCP for admitted traffic. Within an
ISP and on inter-ISP links (i.e., within networks whose internal
paths are uniform at hundreds of megabits per second or faster), one
would expect all of this traffic to be carried in the Real-Time
Traffic (RTP) class described in [RFC5127].

1.1. Definitions

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

The following terms and acronyms are used in this document.

PHB: A Per-Hop Behavior (PHB) is the externally observable
forwarding behavior applied at a Differentiated Services
compliant node to a DS behavior aggregate [RFC2475]. It may
be thought of as a program configured on the interface of an
Internet host or router, specified in terms of drop
probabilities, queuing priorities or rates, and other handling
characteristics for the traffic class.

DSCP: The Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP), as defined in
[RFC2474], is a value that is encoded in the DS field, and
that each DS Node MUST use to select the PHB that is to be
experienced by each packet it forwards [RFC3260]. It is a
6-bit number embedded into the 8-bit TOS (type of service)
field of an IPv4 datagram or the Traffic Class field of an
IPv6 datagram.

CAC: Call Admission Control includes concepts of authorization and
capacity admission. "Authorization" refers to any procedure
that identifies a user, verifies the authenticity of the
identification, and determines whether the user is authorized
to use the service under the relevant policy. "Capacity
Admission" refers to any procedure that determines whether
capacity exists supporting a session's requirements under some
policy.

In the Internet, these are separate functions; while in the
Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), they and call
routing are carried out together.

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UNI: A User/Network Interface (UNI) is the interface (often a
physical link or its virtual equivalent) that connects two
entities that do not trust each other, and in which one (the
user) purchases connectivity services from the other (the
network).

Figure 1 shows two user networks connected by what appears to
each of them to be a single network ("The Internet", access to
which is provided by their service provider) that provides
connectivity services to other users.

UNIs tend to be the bottlenecks in the Internet, where users
purchase relatively low amounts of bandwidth for cost or
service reasons, and as a result are most subject to
congestion issues and therefore issues requiring traffic
conditioning and service prioritization.

NNI: A Network/Network Interface (NNI) is the interface (often a
physical link or its virtual equivalent) that connects two
entities that trust each other within limits, and in which the
two are seen as trading services for value. Figure 1 shows
three service networks that together provide the connectivity
services that we call "the Internet". They are different
administrations and are very probably in competition, but
exchange contracts for connectivity and capacity that enable
them to offer specific services to their customers.

NNIs may not be bottlenecks in the Internet if service
providers contractually agree to provision excess capacity at
them, as they commonly do. However, NNI performance may
differ by ISP, and the performance guarantee interval may
range from a month to a much shorter period. Furthermore, a
peering point NNI may not have contractual performance
guarantees or may become overloaded under certain conditions.
They are also policy-controlled interfaces, especially in BGP.
As a result, they may require a traffic prioritization policy.

Queue: There are multiple ways to build a multi-queue scheduler.
Weighted Round Robin (WRR) literally builds multiple lists and
visits them in a specified order, while a calendar queue
(often used to implement Weighted Fair Queuing, or WFQ) builds
a list for each time interval and queues at most a stated
amount of data in each such list for transmission during that
time interval. While these differ dramatically in
implementation, the external difference in behavior is
generally negligible when they are properly configured.
Consistent with the definitions used in the Differentiated
Services Architecture [RFC2475], these are treated as

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equivalent in this document, and the lists of WRR and the
classes of a calendar queue will be referred to uniformly as
"queues".

_.--------.
,-'' `--.
,-' `-.
,-------. ,',-------. `.
,' `. ,',' `. `.
/ User \ UNI / / Service \ \
( Network +-----+ Network ) `.
\ / ; \ / :
`. ,' ; `. .+ :
'-------' / '-------' \ NNI \
; \ :
; "The Internet" \ ,-------. :
; +' `. :
UNI: User/Network Interface / Service \ |
| ( Network ) |
NNI: Network/Network Interface \ / |
: +. ,' ;
: / '-------' ;
: / ;
,-------. \ ,-------. / NNI /
,' `. : ,' `+ ;
/ User \ UNI / Service \ ;
( Network +-----+ Network ) ,'
\ / \ \ / /
`. ,' `.`. ,' ,'
'-------' `.'-------' ,'
`-. ,-'
`--. _.-'
`--------''

Figure 1: UNI and NNI Interfaces

1.2. Problem

In short, the Telephony Service Class, described in [RFC4594],
permits the use of capacity admission in implementing the service,
but present implementations either provide no capacity admission
services or do so in a manner that depends on specific traffic
engineering. In the context of the Internet backbone, the two are
essentially equivalent; the edge network depends on specific
engineering by the service provider that might not be present,
especially in a mobile environment.

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However, services are being requested of the network that would
specifically make use of capacity admission, and would distinguish
among users or the uses of available Voice-over-IP or Video-over-IP
capacity in various ways. Various agencies would like to provide
services as described in RFC [RFC4190] or in Section 2.6 of
[RFC4504].

This requires the use of capacity admission to differentiate among
users to provide services to them that are not afforded to non-
capacity admitted customer-to-customer IP telephony sessions.

2. Candidate Implementations of the Admitted Telephony Service Class

2.1. Potential Implementations of EF in This Model

There are at least two possible ways to implement isolation between
the Capacity Admitted PHB and the Expedited Forwarding PHB in this
model. They are to implement separate classes as a set of

o Multiple data plane traffic classes, each consisting of a policer
and a queue, with the queues enjoying different priorities, or

o Multiple data plane traffic classes, each consisting of a policer
but feeding into a common queue or multiple queues at the same
priority.

We will explain the difference and describe in what way they differ
in operation. The reason this is necessary is that there is current
confusion in the industry.

The multi-priority model is shown in Figure 2. In this model,
traffic from each service class is placed into a separate priority
queue. If data is present in more than one queue, traffic from one
of them will always be selected for transmission. This has the
effect of transferring jitter from the higher-priority queue to the
lower-priority queues, and reordering traffic in a way that gives the
higher-priority traffic a smaller average queuing delay. Each queue
must have its own policer, however, to protect the network from
errors and attacks; if a traffic class thinks it is carrying a
certain data rate but an abuse sends significantly more, the effect
of simple prioritization would not preserve the lower priorities of
traffic, which could cause routing to fail or otherwise impact a
service level agreement (SLA).

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RFC 5865 DSCP for Capacity-Admitted Traffic May 2010

.
policers priorities |`.
Admitted EF <=> ----------||----+ `.
high| `.
Unadmitted EF <=> ----------||----+ .'-----------
. medium .'
rate queues |`. +-----+ .' Priority
AF1------>||----+ `. / low |' Scheduler
| `. /
AF2------>||----+ .'-+
| .'
CS0------>||----+ .' Rate Scheduler
|' (WFQ, WRR, etc.)

Figure 2: Implementation as a Data Plane Priority

The multi-policer model is shown in Figure 3. In this model, traffic
from each service class is policed according to its SLA requirements,
and then placed into a common priority queue. Unlike the multi-
priority model, the jitter experienced by the traffic classes in this
case is the same, as there is only one queue, but the sum of the
traffic in this higher-priority queue experiences less average jitter
than the elastic traffic in the lower-priority.

policers priorities .
Admitted EF <=> -------\ |`.
--||----+ `.
Unadmitted EF <=> -------/ high| `.
. | .'--------
rate queues |`. +-----+ .'
AF1------>||----+ `. / low | .' Priority
| `. / |' Scheduler
AF2------>||----+ .'-+
| .'
CS0------>||----+ .' Rate Scheduler
|' (WFQ, WRR, etc.)

Figure 3: Implementation as a Data Plane Policer

The difference between the two operationally is, as stated, the
issues of loss due to policing and distribution of jitter.

If the two traffic classes are, for example, voice and video,
datagrams containing video data can be relatively large (often of
variable sizes up to the path MTU), while datagrams containing voice
are relatively small, on the order of only 40 to 200 bytes, depending
on the codec. On lower-speed links (less than 10 MBPS), the jitter
introduced by video to voice can be disruptive, while at higher

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speeds, the jitter is nominal compared to the jitter requirements of
voice. Therefore, at access network speeds, [RFC4594] recommends the
separation of video and voice into separate queues, while at optical
speeds, [RFC5127] recommends that they use a common queue.

If, on the other hand, the two traffic classes are carrying the same
type of application with the same jitter requirements, then giving
one preference in this sense does not benefit the higher-priority
traffic and may harm the lower-priority traffic. In such a case,
using separate policers and a common queue is a superior approach.

2.2. Capacity Admission Control

There are at least six major ways that capacity admission is done or
has been proposed to be done for real-time applications. Each will
be described below, and Section 3 will judge which ones are likely to
meet the requirements of the Admitted Telephony service class. These
include:

o Drop Precedence used to force sessions to voluntarily exit,

o Capacity admission control by assumption or engineering,

o Capacity admission control by call counting,

o Endpoint capacity admission performed by probing the network,

o Centralized capacity admission control via bandwidth broker, and

o Distributed capacity admission control using protocols such as
Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) or Next Steps in Signaling
(NSIS).

The problem with dropping traffic to force users to hang up is that
it affects a broad class of users -- if there is capacity for N calls
and the N+1 calls are active, data is dropped randomly from all
sessions to ensure that offered load doesn't exceed capacity. On
very fast links, that is acceptable, but on lower speed links it can
seriously affect call quality. There is also a behavioral issue
involved here, in which users who experience poor quality calls tend
to hang up and call again, making the problem better -- then worse.

The problem with capacity admission by assumption, which is widely
deployed in today's VoIP environment, is that it depends on the
assumptions made. One can do careful traffic engineering to ensure
needed bandwidth, but this can also be painful, and has to be
revisited when the network is changed or network usage changes.

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The problem with call-counting-based admission control is that it
gets exponentially worse the farther you get from the control point
(e.g., it lacks sufficient scalability on the outskirts of the
network).

There are two fundamental problems with depending on the endpoint to
perform capacity admission: it may not be able to accurately measure
the impact of the traffic it generates on the network, and it tends
to be greedy (e.g., it doesn't care). If the network operator is
providing a service, he must be able to guarantee the service, which
means that he cannot trust systems that are not controlled by his
network.

The problem with capacity controls via a bandwidth broker is that
centralized servers lack far away awareness, and also lack effective
real-time reaction to dynamic changes in all parts of the network at
all instances of time.

The problem with mechanisms that do not enable the association of a
policy with the request is that they do not allow for multi-policy
services, which are becoming important.

The operator's choice of admission procedure MUST, for this DSCP,
ensure the following:

o The actual links that a session uses have enough bandwidth to
support it.

o New sessions are refused admission if there is inadequate
bandwidth under the relevant policy.

o A user is identified and the correct policy is applied if multiple
policies are in use in a network.

o Under periods of network stress, the process of admission of new
sessions does not disrupt existing sessions, unless the service
explicitly allows for disruption of calls.

2.3. Recommendations on Implementation of an Admitted Telephony
Service Class

When coupled with adequate Authentication, Authorization, and
Accounting (AAA) and capacity admission procedures as described in
Section 2.2, either of the two PHB implementations described in
Section 2.1 is sufficient to provide the services required for an
Admitted Telephony service class. If preemption is required, Section
2.3.5.2 of [RFC4542] provides the tools for carrying out the
preemption. If preemption is not in view, or if used in addition to

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preemptive services, the application of different thresholds
depending on call precedence has the effect of improving the
probability of call completion by admitting preferred calls at a time
when other calls are being refused. Routine and priority traffic can
be admitted using the same DSCP value, as the choice of which calls
are admitted is handled in the admission procedure executed in the
control plane, not the policing of the data plane.

On the point of what protocols and procedures are required for
authentication, authorization, and capacity admission, we note that
clear standards do not exist at this time for bandwidth brokers, NSIS
has not been finalized at this time and in any event is limited to
unicast sessions, and that RSVP has been standardized and has the
relevant services. We therefore RECOMMEND the use of a protocol,
such as RSVP, at the UNI. Procedures at the NNI are business matters
to be discussed between the relevant networks, and are RECOMMENDED
but NOT REQUIRED.

3. Summary: Changes from RFC 4594

To summarize, there are two changes to [RFC4594] discussed in this
document:

Telephony class: The Telephony Service Class in RFC 4594 does not
involve capacity admission, but depends on
application layer admission that only estimates
capacity, and does that through static engineering.
In addition to that class, a separate Admitted
Telephony Class is added that performs capacity
admission dynamically.

Video classes: Capacity admission is added to three video classes.
These are the Interactive Real-Time Traffic class,
Broadcast TV class when used for video on demand,
and the Multimedia Conferencing class.

4. IANA Considerations

IANA assigned a DSCP value to a second EF traffic class consistent
with [RFC3246] and [RFC3247] in the "Differentiated Services Field
Codepoints" registry. It implements the Telephony Service Class
described in [RFC4594] at lower speeds and is included in the Real-
Time Treatment Aggregate [RFC5127] at higher speeds. The code point
value should be from pool 1 within the dscp-registry. The value is
parallel with the existing EF code point (101110), as IANA assigned

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the code point 101100 -- keeping the (left-to-right) first 4 binary
values the same in both. The code point described in this document
is referred to as VOICE-ADMIT and has been registered as follows:

Sub-registry: Pool 1 Codepoints
Reference: [RFC2474]
Registration Procedures: Standards Action

Registry:
Name Space Reference
--------- ------- ---------
VOICE-ADMIT 101100 [RFC5865]

This traffic class REQUIRES the use of capacity admission, such as
RSVP services together with AAA services, at the User/Network
Interface (UNI); the use of such services at the NNI is at the option
of the interconnected networks.

5. Security Considerations

A major requirement of this service is effective use of a signaling
protocol, such as RSVP, with the capabilities to identify its user as
either an individual or a member of some corporate entity, and assert
a policy such as "normal", "routine", or some level of "priority".

This capability, one has to believe, will be abused by script kiddies
and others if the proof of identity is not adequately strong or if
policies are written or implemented improperly by the carriers. This
goes without saying, but this section is here for it to be said.

Many of the security considerations from RFC 3246 [RFC3246] apply to
this document, as well as the security considerations in RFC 2474 and
RFC 4542. RFC 4230 [RFC4230] analyzes RSVP, providing some gap
analysis to the NSIS WG as they started their work. Keep in mind
that this document is advocating RSVP at the UNI only, while RFC 4230
discusses (mostly) RSVP from a more complete point of view (i.e., e2e
and edge2edge). When considering the RSVP aspect of this document,
understanding Section 6 of RFC 4230 is a good source of information.

6. Acknowledgements

Kwok Ho Chan, Georgios Karagiannis, Dan Voce, and Bob Briscoe
commented and offered text. The impetus for including video in the
discussion, which initially only targeted voice, is from Dave
McDysan.

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7. References

7.1. Normative References

[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

[RFC2474] Nichols, K., Blake, S., Baker, F., and D. Black,
"Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS
Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers", RFC 2474, December
1998.

[RFC3246] Davie, B., Charny, A., Bennet, J., Benson, K., Le Boudec,
J., Courtney, W., Davari, S., Firoiu, V., and D.
Stiliadis, "An Expedited Forwarding PHB (Per-Hop
Behavior)", RFC 3246, March 2002.

7.2. Informative References

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

[RFC3247] Charny, A., Bennet, J., Benson, K., Boudec, J., Chiu, A.,
Courtney, W., Davari, S., Firoiu, V., Kalmanek, C., and K.
Ramakrishnan, "Supplemental Information for the New
Definition of the EF PHB (Expedited Forwarding Per-Hop
Behavior)", RFC 3247, March 2002.

[RFC3260] Grossman, D., "New Terminology and Clarifications for
Diffserv", RFC 3260, April 2002.

[RFC4190] Carlberg, K., Brown, I., and C. Beard, "Framework for
Supporting Emergency Telecommunications Service (ETS) in
IP Telephony", RFC 4190, November 2005.

[RFC4504] Sinnreich, H., Ed., Lass, S., and C. Stredicke, "SIP
Telephony Device Requirements and Configuration", RFC
4504, May 2006.

[RFC4542] Baker, F. and J. Polk, "Implementing an Emergency
Telecommunications Service (ETS) for Real-Time Services in
the Internet Protocol Suite", RFC 4542, May 2006.

[RFC4594] Babiarz, J., Chan, K., and F. Baker, "Configuration
Guidelines for DiffServ Service Classes", RFC 4594, August
2006.

Baker, et al. Standards Track [Page 13]

RFC 5865 DSCP for Capacity-Admitted Traffic May 2010

[RFC5127] Chan, K., Babiarz, J., and F. Baker, "Aggregation of
DiffServ Service Classes", RFC 5127, February 2008.

[RFC4230] Tschofenig, H. and R. Graveman, "RSVP Security
Properties", RFC 4230, December 2005.

Authors' Addresses

Fred Baker
Cisco Systems
Santa Barbara, California 93117
USA

Phone: +1-408-526-4257
EMail: [email protected]

James Polk
Cisco Systems
Richardson, Texas 75082
USA

Phone: +1-817-271-3552
EMail: [email protected]

Martin Dolly
AT&T Labs
Middletown Township, New Jersey 07748
USA

Phone: +1-732-420-4574
EMail: [email protected]

Baker, et al. Standards Track [Page 14]