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Load Sharing for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
draft-tuexen-tsvwg-sctp-multipath-03

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Active".
Authors Martin Becke , Thomas Dreibholz , Jana Iyengar , Preethi Natarajan , Michael Tüxen
Last updated 2012-01-18 (Latest revision 2011-07-02)
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draft-tuexen-tsvwg-sctp-multipath-03
Network Working Group                                           M. Becke
Internet-Draft                                              T. Dreibholz
Intended status: Experimental               University of Duisburg-Essen
Expires: July 21, 2012                                        J. Iyengar
                                           Franklin and Marshall College
                                                            P. Natarajan
                                                           Cisco Systems
                                                               M. Tuexen
                                               Muenster Univ. of Applied
                                                                Sciences
                                                        January 18, 2012

    Load Sharing for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)
                draft-tuexen-tsvwg-sctp-multipath-03.txt

Abstract

   The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) supports multi-homing
   for providing network fault tolerance.  However, mainly one path is
   used for data transmission.  Only timer-based retransmissions are
   carried over other paths as well.

   This document describes how multiple paths can be used simultaneously
   for transmitting user messages.

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
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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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   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 21, 2012.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

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   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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Conventions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   3.  Load Sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     3.1.  Split Fast Retransmissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     3.2.  Appropriate Congestion Window Growth . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     3.3.  Appropriate Delayed Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   4.  Buffer Blocking Mitigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     4.1.  Sender Buffer Splitting  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     4.2.  Receiver Buffer Splitting  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     4.3.  Problems during Path Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
       4.3.1.  Problem Description  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
       4.3.2.  Solution: Potentially-failed Destination State . . . .  6
     4.4.  Non-Renegable SACK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       4.4.1.  Problem Description  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       4.4.2.  Solution: Non-Renegable SACKs  . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   5.  Handling of Shared Bottlenecks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     5.1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     5.2.  Initial Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     5.3.  Congestion Window Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     5.4.  Congestion Window Decrease . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   6.  Chunk Scheduling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   7.  Application Programming Interface  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   8.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   9.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

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1.  Introduction

   One of the important features of the Stream Control Transmission
   Protocol (SCTP), which is currently specified in [RFC4960], is
   network fault tolerance.  This feature is for example required for
   Reliable Server Pooling (RSerPool, [RFC5351]).  Therefore,
   transmitting messages over multiple paths is supported, but only for
   redundancy.  So [RFC4960] does not specify how to use multiple paths
   simultaneously.

   This document overcomes this limitation by specifying how multiple
   paths can be used simultaneously.  This has several benefits:

   o  Improved bandwidth usage.

   o  Better availability check with real user messages compared to
      HEARTBEAT-based information.

2.  Conventions

   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 [RFC2119].

3.  Load Sharing

   Basic requirement for applying SCTP load sharing is the Concurrent
   Multipath Transfer (CMT) extension of SCTP, which utilises multiple
   paths simultaneously.  We denote CMT-enabled SCTP as CMT-SCTP
   throughout this document.  CMT-SCTP is introduced in [IAS06] and in
   more detail in [I06], some illustrative examples of chunk handling
   are provided in [DBP10a].  CMT-SCTP provides three modifications to
   standard SCTP (split Fast Retransmissions, appropriate congestion
   window growth and delayed SACKs), which are described in the
   following subsections.

3.1.  Split Fast Retransmissions

   Paths with different latencies lead to overtaking of DATA chunks.
   This leads to gap reports, which are handled by Fast Retransmissions.
   However, due to the fact that multiple paths are used simultaneously,
   these Fast Retransmissions are usually useless and furthermore lead
   to a decreased congestion window size.

   To avoid unnecessary Fast Retransmissions, the sender has to keep
   track of the path each DATA chunk has been sent on and consider

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   transmission paths before performing Fast Retransmissions.  That is,
   on reception of a SACK, the sender MUST identify the highest
   acknowledged TSN on each path.  A chunk SHOULD only be considered as
   missing if its TSN is smaller than the highest acknowledged TSN on
   its path.  Section 3.1 of [DBP10a] contains an illustrated example.

3.2.  Appropriate Congestion Window Growth

   The congestion window adaptation algorithm for SCTP [RFC4960] allows
   increasing the congestion window only when a new cumulative ack
   (CumAck) is received by a sender.  When SACKs with unchanged CumAcks
   are generated (due to reordering) and later arrive at a sender, the
   sender does not modify its congestion window.  Since a CMT-SCTP
   receiver naturally observes reordering, many SACKs are sent
   containing new gap reports but not new CumAcks.  When these gaps are
   later acked by a new CumAck, congestion window growth occurs, but
   only for the data newly acked in the most recent SACK.  Data
   previously acked through gap reports will not contribute to
   congestion window growth, in order to prevent sudden increases in the
   congestion window resulting in bursts of data being sent.

   To overcome the problems described above, the congestion window
   growth has to be handled as follows [IAS06]:

   o  The sender SHOULD keep track of the earliest non-retransmitted
      outstanding TSN per path.

   o  The sender SHOULD keep track of the earliest retransmitted
      outstanding TSN per path.

   o  The in-order delivery per path SHOULD be deduced.

   o  The congestion window of a path SHOULD be increased when the
      earliest non-retransmitted outstanding TSN of this path is
      advanced ("Pseudo CumAck") OR when the earliest retransmitted
      outstanding TSN of this path is advanced ("RTX Pseudo CumAck").

   Section 3.2 of [DBP10a] contains an illustrated example of
   appropriate congestion window handling for CMT-SCTP.

3.3.  Appropriate Delayed Acknowledgements

   Standard SCTP [RFC4960] sends a SACK as soon as an out-of-sequence
   TSN has been received.  Delayed Acknowledgements are only allowed if
   the received TSNs are in sequence.  However, due to the load
   balancing of CMT-SCTP, DATA chunks may overtake each other.  This
   leads to a high number of out-of-sequence TSNs, which have to be
   acknowledged immediately.  Clearly, this behaviour increases the

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   overhead traffic (usually nearly one SACK chunk for each received
   packet containing a DATA chunk).

   Delayed Acknowledgements for CMT-SCTP are handled as follows:

   o  In addition to [RFC4960], delaying of SACKs SHOULD *also* be
      applied for out-of-sequence TSNs.

   o  A receiver MUST maintain a counter for the number of DATA chunks
      received before sending a SACK.  The value of the counter is
      stored into each SACK chunk (FIXME: add details; needs reservation
      of flags bits by IANA).  After transmitting a SACK, the counter
      MUST be reset to 0.  Its initial value MUST be 0.

   o  The SACK handling procedure for a missing TSN M is extended as
      follows:

      *  If all newly acknowledged TSNs have been transmitted over the
         same path:

         +  If there are newly acknowledged TSNs L and H so that L <= M
            <= H, the missing count of TSN M SHOULD be incremented by
            one (like for standard SCTP according to [RFC4960]).

         +  Else if all newly acknowledged TSNs N satisfy the condition
            M <= N, the missing count of TSN M SHOULD be incremented by
            the number of TSNs reported in the SACK chunk.

      *  Otherwise (that is, there are newly acknowledged TSNs on
         different paths), the missing count of TSN M SHOULD be
         incremented by one (like for standard SCTP according to
         [RFC4960]).

   Section 3.3 of [DBP10a] contains an illustrated example of Delayed
   Acknowledgements for CMT-SCTP.

4.  Buffer Blocking Mitigation

   TBD.  See [ADB11], [DBR10].

4.1.  Sender Buffer Splitting

   TBD.  See [ADB11], [DBR10].

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4.2.  Receiver Buffer Splitting

   TBD.  See [ADB11], [DBR10].

4.3.  Problems during Path Failure

   This section discusses CMT's receive buffer related problems during
   path failure, and proposes a solution for the same.

4.3.1.  Problem Description

   Link failures arise when a router or a link connecting two routers
   fails due to link disconnection, hardware malfunction, or software
   error.  Overloaded links caused by flash crowds and denial-of-service
   (DoS) attacks also degrade end-to-end communication between peer
   hosts.  Ideally, the routing system detects link failures, and in
   response, reconfigures the routing tables and avoids routing traffic
   via the failed link.  However, existing research highlights problems
   with Internet backbone routing that result in long route convergence
   times.  The pervasiveness of path failures motivated us to study
   their impact on CMT, since CMT achieves better throughput via
   simultaneous data transmission over multiple end-to-end paths.

   CMT is an extension to SCTP, and therefore retains SCTP's failure
   detection process.  A CMT sender uses a tunable failure detection
   threshold called Path.Max.Retrans (PMR).  When a sender experiences
   more than PMR consecutive timeouts while trying to reach an active
   destination, the destination is marked as failed.  With PMR=5, the
   failure detection takes 6 consecutive timeouts or 63s.  After every
   timeout, the CMT sender continues to transmit new data on the failed
   path increasing the chances of receive buffer (rbuf) blocking and
   degrading CMT performance during permanent and short-term path
   failures [NEA08].

4.3.2.  Solution: Potentially-failed Destination State

   To mitigate the rbuf blocking, we introduce a new destination state
   called "potentially-failed" state in SCTP (and CMT's) failure
   detection process [I-D.nishida-tsvwg-sctp-failover].  This solution
   is based on the rationale that loss detected by a timeout implies
   either severe congestion or failure en route.  After a single timeout
   on a path, a sender is unsure, and marks the corresponding
   destination as "potentially-failed" (PF).  A PF destination is not
   used for data transmission or retransmission.  CMT's retransmission
   policies are augmented to include the PF state.  Performance
   evaluations prove that the PF state significantly reduces rbuf
   blocking during failure detection [NEA08].

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4.4.  Non-Renegable SACK

   This section discusses problems with SCTP's SACK mechanism and how it
   affects the send buffer and CMT performance.

4.4.1.  Problem Description

   Gap-acks acknowledge DATA chunks that arrive out-of-order to a
   transport layer data receiver.  A gap-ack in SCTP is advisory, in
   that, while it notifies a data sender about the reception of
   indicated DATA chunks, the data receiver is permitted to later
   discard DATA chunks that it previously had gap-acked.  Discarding a
   previously gap-acked DATA chunk is known as "reneging".  Because of
   the possibility of reneging in SCTP, any gap-acked DATA chunk MUST
   NOT be removed from the data sender's retransmission queue until the
   DATA chunk is later CumAcked.

   Situations exist when a data receiver knows that reneging on a
   particular out-of-order DATA chunk will never take place, such as
   (but not limited to) after an out-of-order DATA chunk is delivered to
   the receiving application.  With current SACKs in SCTP, it is not
   possible for a data receiver to inform a data sender if or when a
   particular out-of-order "deliverable" DATA chunk has been "delivered"
   to the receiving application.  Thus the data sender MUST keep a copy
   of every gap-acked out-of-order DATA chunk(s) in the data sender's
   retransmission queue until the DATA chunk is CumAcked.  This use of
   the data sender's retransmission queue is wasteful.  The wasted
   buffer often degrades CMT performance; the degradation increases when
   a CMT flow traverses via paths with disparate end-to-end properties
   [NEY08].

4.4.2.  Solution: Non-Renegable SACKs

   Non-Renegable Selective Acknowledgments (NR-SACKs)
   [I-D.natarajan-tsvwg-sctp-nrsack] are a new kind of acknowledgements,
   extending SCTP's SACK chunk functionalities.  The NR-SACK chunk is an
   extension of the existing SACK chunk.  Several fields are identical,
   including the Cumulative TSN Ack, the Advertised Receiver Window
   Credit (a_rwnd), and Duplicate TSNs.  These fields have the same
   semantics as described in [RFC4960].

   NR-SACKs also identify out-of-order DATA chunks that a receiver
   either: (1) has delivered to its receiving application, or (2) takes
   full responsibility to eventually deliver to its receiving
   application.  These out-of-order DATA chunks are "non-renegable."
   Non-Renegable data are reported in the NR Gap Ack Block field of the
   NR-SACK chunk as described [I-D.natarajan-tsvwg-sctp-nrsack].  We
   refer to non-renegable selective acknowledgements as "nr-gap-acks."

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   When an out-of-order DATA chunk is nr-gap-acked, the data sender no
   longer needs to keep that particular DATA chunk in its retransmission
   queue, thus allowing the data sender to free up its buffer space
   sooner than if the DATA chunk were only gap-acked.  NR-SACKs improve
   send buffer utilization and throughput for CMT flows [NEY08].

5.  Handling of Shared Bottlenecks

5.1.  Introduction

   CMT-SCTP assumes all paths to be disjoint.  Since each path
   independently uses a TCP-like congestion control, an SCTP association
   using N paths over the same bottleneck acquires N times the bandwidth
   of a concurrent TCP flow.  This is clearly unfair.  A reliable
   detection of shared bottlenecks is impossible in arbitrary networks
   like the Internet.  Therefore, [DBA11], [DBP10b] apply the idea of
   Resource Pooling to CMT-SCTP.  Resource Pooling (RP) denotes "making
   a collection of resources behave like a single pooled resource"
   [WHB09].  The modifications of RP-enabled CMT-SCTP, further denoted
   as CMT/RP-SCTP, are described in the following subsections.  A
   detailed description of CMT/RP-SCTP, including congestion control
   examples, can be found in [DBA11], [DBP10b].

5.2.  Initial Values

   TDB.

5.3.  Congestion Window Growth

   TDB.  See [DBA11].

5.4.  Congestion Window Decrease

   TDB.  See [DBA11].

6.  Chunk Scheduling

   TDB.  See [DST10].

7.  Application Programming Interface

   See [I-D.dreibholz-tsvwg-sctpsocket-multipath] and
   [I-D.dreibholz-tsvwg-sctpsocket-sqinfo].

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8.  IANA Considerations

   TBD.

9.  Security Considerations

   This document does not add any additional security considerations in
   addition to the ones given in [RFC4960].

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

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

   [RFC4960]  Stewart, R., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
              RFC 4960, September 2007.

   [RFC5351]  Lei, P., Ong, L., Tuexen, M., and T. Dreibholz, "An
              Overview of Reliable Server Pooling Protocols", RFC 5351,
              September 2008.

   [I-D.nishida-tsvwg-sctp-failover]
              Nishida, Y., Natarajan, P., and A. Caro, "Quick Failover
              Algorithm in SCTP", draft-nishida-tsvwg-sctp-failover-04
              (work in progress), September 2011.

   [I-D.natarajan-tsvwg-sctp-nrsack]
              Ekiz, N., Amer, P., Natarajan, P., Stewart, R., and J.
              Iyengar, "Non-Renegable Selective Acknowledgements (NR-
              SACKs) for SCTP", draft-natarajan-tsvwg-sctp-nrsack-08
              (work in progress), August 2011.

   [I-D.dreibholz-tsvwg-sctpsocket-multipath]
              Dreibholz, T. and M. Becke, "SCTP Socket API Extensions
              for Concurrent Multipath Transfer",
              draft-dreibholz-tsvwg-sctpsocket-multipath-02 (work in
              progress), October 2011.

   [I-D.dreibholz-tsvwg-sctpsocket-sqinfo]
              Dreibholz, T., Seggelmann, R., and M. Becke, "Sender Queue
              Info Option for the SCTP Socket API",
              draft-dreibholz-tsvwg-sctpsocket-sqinfo-02 (work in
              progress), October 2011.

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10.2.  Informative References

   [I06]      Iyengar, J., "End-to-End Concurrent Multipath Transfer
              Using Transport Layer Multihoming", PhD
              Dissertation Computer Science Dept., University of
              Delaware, April 2006.

   [IAS06]    Iyengar, J., Amer, P., and R. Stewart, "Concurrent
              Multipath Transfer Using SCTP Multihoming Over Independent
              End-to-End Paths", Journal IEEE/ACM Transactions on
              Networking, October 2006.

   [NEA08]    Natarajan, P., Ekiz, N., Iyengar, J., Amer, P., and R.
              Stewart, "Concurrent Multipath Transfer Using Transport
              Layer Multihoming: Introducing the Potentially-failed
              Destination State", Proceedings of the IFIP Networking,
              May 2008.

   [NEY08]    Natarajan, P., Ekiz, N., Yilmaz, E., Amer, P., Iyengar,
              J., and R. Stewart, "Non-Renegable Selective
              Acknowledgments (NR-SACKs) for SCTP", Proceedings of the
              16th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols
              (ICNP), October 2008.

   [WHB09]    Wischik, D., Handley, M., and M. Braun, "The Resource
              Pooling Principle", Journal ACM SIGCOMM Computer
              Communication Review, October 2009.

   [DBP10a]   Dreibholz, T., Becke, M., Pulinthanath, J., and E.
              Rathgeb, "Implementation and Evaluation of Concurrent
              Multipath Transfer for SCTP in the INET Framework",
              Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/ICST OMNeT++ Workshop,
              March 2010.

   [DBP10b]   Dreibholz, T., Becke, M., Pulinthanath, J., and E.
              Rathgeb, "Applying TCP-Friendly Congestion Control to
              Concurrent Multipath Transfer", Proceedings of the IEEE
              24th International Conference on Advanced Information
              Networking and Applications (AINA), April 2010.

   [DBR10]    Dreibholz, T., Becke, M., Rathgeb, E., and M. Tuexen, "On
              the Use of Concurrent Multipath Transfer over Asymmetric
              Paths", Proceedings of the IEEE Global Communications
              Conference (GLOBECOM), December 2010.

   [DST10]    Dreibholz, T., Seggelmann, R., Tuexen, M., and E. Rathgeb,
              "Transmission Scheduling Optimizations for Concurrent
              Multipath Transfer", Proceedings of the 8th International

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              Workshop on Protocols for Future, Large-Scale and Diverse
              Network Transports (PFLDNeT) , November 2010.

   [ADB11]    Adhari, H., Dreibholz, T., Becke, M., Rathgeb, E., and M.
              Tuexen, "Evaluation of Concurrent Multipath Transfer over
              Dissimilar Paths", Proceedings of the 1st International
              Workshop on Protocols and Applications with Multi-Homing
              Support (PAMS), March 2011.

   [DBA11]    Dreibholz, T., Becke, M., Adhari, H., and E. Rathgeb, "On
              the Impact of Congestion Control for Concurrent Multipath
              Transfer on the Transport Layer", Proceedings of the 11th
              IEEE International Conference on
              Telecommunications (ConTEL), June 2011.

Authors' Addresses

   Martin Becke
   University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Experimental Mathematics
   Ellernstrasse 29
   45326 Essen, Nordrhein-Westfalen
   Germany

   Phone: +49-201-183-7667
   Fax:   +49-201-183-7673
   Email: martin.becke@uni-due.de

   Thomas Dreibholz
   University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Experimental Mathematics
   Ellernstrasse 29
   45326 Essen, Nordrhein-Westfalen
   Germany

   Phone: +49-201-183-7637
   Fax:   +49-201-183-7673
   Email: dreibh@iem.uni-due.de
   URI:   http://www.iem.uni-due.de/~dreibh/

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   Janardhan Iyengar
   Franklin and Marshall College, Mathematics and Computer Science
   PO Box 3003
   Lancaster, Pennsylvania  17604-3003
   USA

   Phone: +1-717-358-4774
   Email: jiyengar@fandm.edu
   URI:   http://www.fandm.edu/jiyengar/

   Preethi Natarajan
   Cisco Systems
   425 East Tasman Drive
   San Jose, California  95134
   USA

   Email: prenatar@cisco.com

   Michael Tuexen
   Muenster University of Applied Sciences
   Stegerwaldstrasse 39
   48565 Steinfurt
   Germany

   Email: tuexen@fh-muenster.de

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