2.7.3 Endpoint Congestion Management (ecm)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 47th IETF Meeting in Adelaide, Australia. It may now be out-of-date. Last Modified: 03-Feb-00

Chair(s):

Vern Paxson <vern@aciri.org>

Transport Area Director(s):

Scott Bradner <sob@harvard.edu>
Vern Paxson <vern@aciri.org>

Transport Area Advisor:

Scott Bradner <sob@harvard.edu>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion:ecm@aciri.org
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Archive: ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/

Description of Working Group:

The Endpoint Congestion Management (ECM) Working Group has two goals:

1) To provide a standard set of congestion control algorithms that transport protocols can take advantage of rather than having to develop their own

2) To develop mechanisms for unifying congestion control across an appropriate subset of an endpoint's active unicast connections.

For ECM, we define a "congestion group" as one or more unicast connections communicating with a common destination, and for which a decision has been made to bundle the connections together into a single flow for purposes of congestion control.

For each congestion group, a Congestion Manager (CM) will track the capacity currently available along the network path(s) used by the group, based on congestion indications such as packet loss information, in a manner analogous to TCP's "congestion window". The CM will then pass this information along to a Scheduler module that determines how that capacity is to be partitioned among the connections in the congestion group.

Determining the granularity of "common destination" (e.g., particular subnet, CIDR mask, specific address, or specific address and range of ports), and making the decision as to which connections should be bundled together into a single congestion group and which go into separate groups, are both difficult problems, because they are heavily influenced by the specifics of both the remote network topology and by possibly-remote policy decisions. It is the hope of the IESG that the IRTF will undertake research into exploring how to address these issues. In the interim, the working group is charged with devising near-term solutions to these problems with sufficient flexibility to accommodate those possible alternative schemes sufficient flexibility to accommodate those possible alternative schemes that can be anticipated. The working group is also charged with maintaining good communications with the IRTF effort, should one materialize.

The CM architecture will stress separation of the mechanisms of determining the current available capacity from the policies of how to then schedule that capacity. It is a requirement that the architecture eventually apply both to TCP and to UDP-based (and other IP-based) transport that includes feedback information concerning congestion (e.g., packet loss or explicit congestion notification). The initial WG deliverables will focus on developing CM for unifying connections that either use TCP or use UDP in a style comparable with TCP in terms of detecting loss and measuring the round-trip time. It is possible that the scope of work will be extended in the future to also include mechanisms for applying congestion control to transports that do not include such feedback.

The WG is also tasked to investigate the architecture's security implications; and the degree to which network stability will be entrusted to correct operation of applications using ALF transports, rather than operating system kernels.

The WG will initially produce four documents:

- An Informational RFC on congestion control principles. The goal of this document is to explain the need for congestion control and what constitutes correct congestion control. One specific goal is to illustrate the dangers of neglecting to apply proper congestion control, including the sometimes elusive argument that congestion control is not needed because the protocol will only be run over well-provisioned paths.

- A Standards Track RFC describing the behavior of a standard-conforming Congestion Manager (how it decides the current available given congestion feedback from the members of a congestion group).

- A Standards Track RFC giving an abstract API for communication between Congestion Manager clients, the Congestion Manager, and the Scheduler. This initial work is confined in scope to supporting congestion groups made up of either TCP connections and/or UDP connections that incorporate the same sort of feedback (per packet loss information; RTT computation) as TCP.

- An Informational RFC giving an example of the behavior of one or more Schedulers.

Goals and Milestones:

Feb 00

  

Congestion control principles documented submitted to IESG for publication as Informational

Feb 00

  

Description of required behavior for Congestion Managers submitted to the IESG for publication as Proposed Standard

Feb 00

  

Abstract API for congestion management submitted to IESG for publication as Proposed Standard

May 00

  

Example description of behavior of ECM Scheduler submitted to the IESG for publication as Informational

Jun 00

  

Working Group rechartered with revised deliverables or shut down

No Current Internet-Drafts
No Request For Comments

Current Meeting Report

None received.

Slides

None received.