Internet DRAFT - draft-briscoe-conex-re-ecn-motiv

draft-briscoe-conex-re-ecn-motiv






Transport Area Working Group                             B. Briscoe, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                                A. Jacquet
Intended status: Historic                                             BT
Expires: September 12, 2014                                 T. Moncaster
                                                           Moncaster.com
                                                                A. Smith
                                                                      BT
                                                          March 11, 2014


   Re-ECN: A Framework for adding Congestion Accountability to TCP/IP
                  draft-briscoe-conex-re-ecn-motiv-03

Abstract

   This document describes a framework for using a new protocol called
   re-ECN (re-inserted explicit congestion notification), which can be
   deployed incrementally around unmodified routers.  Re-ECN allows
   accurate congestion monitoring throughout the network thus enabling
   the upstream party at any trust boundary in the internetwork to be
   held responsible for the congestion they cause, or allow to be
   caused.  So, networks can introduce straightforward accountability
   for congestion and policing mechanisms for incoming traffic from end-
   customers or from neighbouring network domains.  As well as giving
   the motivation for re-ECN this document also gives examples of
   mechanisms that can use the protocol to ensure data sources respond
   correctly to congestion.  And it describes example mechanisms that
   ensure the dominant selfish strategy of both network domains and end-
   points will be to use the protocol honestly.

   Note concerning Intended Status: If this draft were ever published as
   an RFC it would probably have historic status.  There is limited
   space in the IP header, so re-ECN had to compromise by requiring the
   receiver to be ECN-enabled otherwise the sender could not use re-ECN.
   Re-ECN was a precursor to chartering of the IETF's Congestion
   Exposure (ConEx) working group, but during chartering there were
   still too few ECN receivers enabled, therefore it was decided to
   pursue other compromises in order to fit a similar capability into
   the IP header.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-



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   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on September 12, 2014.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     1.1.  Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     1.2.  Re-ECN Protocol in Brief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     1.3.  The Re-ECN Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     1.4.  Solving Hard Problems  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     1.5.  The Rest of this Document  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   2.  Requirements notation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   3.  Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     3.1.  Policing Congestion Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
       3.1.1.  The Policing Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
       3.1.2.  The Case Against Bottleneck Policing . . . . . . . . . 10
   4.  Re-ECN Incentive Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
     4.1.  Revealing Congestion Along the Path  . . . . . . . . . . . 11
       4.1.1.  Positive and Negative Flows  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
     4.2.  Incentive Framework Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
     4.3.  Egress Dropper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
     4.4.  Ingress Policing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     4.5.  Inter-domain Policing  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
     4.6.  Inter-domain Fail-safes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
     4.7.  The Case against Classic Feedback  . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
     4.8.  Simulations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
   5.  Other Applications of Re-ECN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26



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     5.1.  DDoS Mitigation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
     5.2.  End-to-end QoS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
     5.3.  Traffic Engineering  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
     5.4.  Inter-Provider Service Monitoring  . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
   6.  Limitations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
   7.  Incremental Deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
     7.1.  Incremental Deployment Features  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
     7.2.  Incremental Deployment Incentives  . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
   8.  Architectural Rationale  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
   9.  Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
     9.1.  Policing Rate Response to Congestion . . . . . . . . . . . 38
     9.2.  Congestion Notification Integrity  . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
     9.3.  Identifying Upstream and Downstream Congestion . . . . . . 39
   10. Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
   11. IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
   12. Conclusions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
   13. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
   14. Comments Solicited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
   15. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
     15.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
     15.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
   Appendix A.  Example Egress Dropper Algorithm  . . . . . . . . . . 43
   Appendix B.  Policer Designs to ensure Congestion
                Responsiveness  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
     B.1.  Per-user Policing  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
     B.2.  Per-flow Rate Policing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
   Appendix C.  Downstream Congestion Metering Algorithms . . . . . . 47
     C.1.  Bulk Downstream Congestion Metering Algorithm  . . . . . . 48
     C.2.  Inflation Factor for Persistently Negative Flows . . . . . 48
   Appendix D.  Re-TTL  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
   Appendix E.  Argument for holding back the ECN nonce . . . . . . . 50




















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Authors' Statement: Status (to be removed by the RFC Editor)

   Although the re-ECN protocol is intended to make a simple but far-
   reaching change to the Internet architecture, the most immediate
   priority for the authors is to delay any move of the ECN nonce to
   Proposed Standard status.  The argument for this position is
   developed in Appendix E.

1.  Introduction

   This document aims to:

   o  Describe the motivation for wanting to introduce re-ECN;

   o  Provide a very brief description of the protocol;

   o  The framework within which the protocol sits;

   o  To show how a number of hard problems become much easier to solve
      once re-ECN is available in IP.

   This introduction starts with a run through of these 4 points.

1.1.  Motivation

   Re-ECN is proposed as a means of allowing accurate monitoring of
   congestion throughout the Internet.  The current Internet relies on
   the vast majority of end-systems running TCP and reacting to detected
   congestion by reducing their sending rates.  Thus congestion control
   is conducted by the collaboration of the majority of end-systems.

   In this situation it is possible for applications that are
   unresponsive to congestion to take whatever share of bottleneck
   resources they want from responsive flows, the responsive flows
   reduce their sending rate in face of congestion and effectively get
   out of the way of unresponsive flows.  An increasing proportion of
   such applications could lead to congestion collapse being more common
   [RFC3714].  Each network has no visibility of whole path congestion
   and can only respond to congestion on a local basis.

   Using re-ECN will allow any point along a path to calculate
   congestion both upstream and downstream of that point.  As a
   consequence of this policing of congestion /could/ be carried out in
   the network if end-systems fail to do so.  Re-ECN enables flows and
   users to be policed and for policing to happen at network ingress and
   at network borders.





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1.2.  Re-ECN Protocol in Brief

   In re-ECN each sender makes a prediction of the congestion that each
   flow will cause and signals that prediction within the IP headers of
   that flow.  The prediction is based on, but not limited to, feedback
   received from the receiver.  Sending a prediction of the congestion
   gives network equipment a view of the congestion downstream and
   upstream.

   In order to explain this mechanism we introduce the notion of IP
   packets carrying different, notional values dependent on the state of
   their header flags:

   o  Negative - are those marked by queues when incipient congestion is
      detected.  This is exactly the same as ECN [RFC3168];

   o  Positive - are sent by the sender in proportion to the number of
      bytes in packets that have been marked negative according to
      feedback received from the receiver;

   o  Cautious - are sent whenever the sender cannot be sure of the
      correct amount of positive bytes to inject into the network for
      example, at the start of a flow to indicate that feedback has not
      been established;

   o  Cancelled - packets sent by the sender as positive that get marked
      as negative by queues in the network due to incipient congestion;

   o  Neutral - normal IP packets but show queues that they can be
      marked negative.

   A flow starts to transmit packets.  No feedback has been established
   so a number of cautious packets are sent (see the protocol definition
   [Re-TCP] for an analysis of how many cautious packets should be sent
   at flow start).  The rest are sent as neutral.

   The packets traverse a congested queue.  A fraction are marked
   negative as an indication of incipient congestion.

   The packets are received by the receiver.  The receiver feeds back to
   the sender a count of the number of packets that have been marked
   negative.  This feedback can be provided either by the transport
   (e.g.  TCP) or by higher-layer control messages.

   The sender receives the feedback and then sends a number of positive
   packets in proportion to the bytes represented by packets that have
   been marked negative.  It is important to note that congestion is
   revealed by the fraction of marked packets rather than a field in the



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   IP header.  This is due to the limited code points available and
   includes use of the last unallocated bit (sometimes called the evil
   bit [RFC3514]).  Full details of the code points used is given in
   [Re-TCP].  This lack of codepoints is, however, the case with IPv4.
   ECN is similarly restricted.

   The number of bytes inside the negative packets and positive packets
   should therefore be approximately equal at the termination point of
   the flow.  To put it another way, the balance of negative and
   positive should be zero.

1.3.  The Re-ECN Framework

   The introducion of the protocol enables 3 things:

   o  Gives a view of whole path congestion;

   o  Enables policing of flows;

   o  It allows networks to monitor the flow of congestion across their
      borders.

   At any point in the network a device can calculate the upstream
   congestion by calculating the fraction of bytes in negative packets
   to total packets.  This it could do using ECN by calculating the
   fraction of packets marked Congestion Experienced.

   Using re-ECN a device in the network can calculate downstream
   congestion by subtracting the fraction of negative packets from the
   fraction of positive packets.

   A user can be restricted to only causing a certain amount of
   congestion.  A Policer could be introduced at the ingress of a
   network that counts the number of positive packets being sent and
   limits the sender if that sender ties to transmit more positive
   packets than their allowance.

   A user could deliberately ignore some or all of the feedback and
   transmit packets with a zero or much lower proportion of positive
   packets than negative packets.  To solve this a Dropper is proposed.
   This would be placed at the egress of a network.  If the number of
   negative packets exceeds the number of positive packets then the flow
   could be dropped or some other sanction enacted.

   Policers and droppers could be used between networks in order to
   police bulk traffic.  A whole network harbouring users causing
   congestion in downstream networks can be held responsible or policed
   by its downstream neighbour.



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1.4.  Solving Hard Problems

   We have already shown that by making flows declare the level of
   congestion they are causing that they can be policed, more
   specifically these are the kind of problems that can be solved:

   o  mitigating distributed denial of service (DDoS);

   o  simplifying differentiation of quality of service (QoS);

   o  policing compliance to congestion control;

   o  inter-provider service monitoring;

   o  etc.

   Uniquely, re-ECN manages to enable solutions to these problems
   without unduly stifling innovative new ways to use the Internet.
   This was a hard balance to strike, given it could be argued that DDoS
   is an innovative way to use the Internet.  The most valuable insight
   was to allow each network to choose the level of constraint it wishes
   to impose.  Also re-ECN has been carefully designed so that networks
   that choose to use it conservatively can protect themselves against
   the congestion caused in their network by users on other networks
   with more liberal policies.

   For instance, some network owners want to block applications like
   voice and video unless their network is compensated for the extra
   share of bottleneck bandwidth taken.  These real-time applications
   tend to be unresponsive when congestion arises.  Whereas elastic TCP-
   based applications back away quickly, ending up taking a much smaller
   share of congested capacity for themselves.  Other network owners
   want to invest in large amounts of capacity and make their gains from
   simplicity of operation and economies of scale.

   While we have designed re-ECN so that networks can choose to deploy
   stringent policing, this does not imply we advocate that every
   network should introduce tight controls on those that cause
   congestion.  Re-ECN has been specifically designed to allow different
   networks to choose how conservative or liberal they wish to be with
   respect to policing congestion.  But those that choose to be
   conservative can protect themselves from the excesses that liberal
   networks allow their users.

   Re-ECN allows the more conservative networks to police out flows that
   have not asked to be unresponsive to congestion---not because they
   are voice or video---just because they don't respond to congestion.
   But it also allows other networks to choose not to police.



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   Crucially, when flows from liberal networks cross into a conservative
   network, re-ECN enables the conservative network to apply penalties
   to its neighbouring networks for the congestion they allow to be
   caused.  And these penalties can be applied to bulk data, without
   regard to flows.

   Then, if unresponsive applications become so dominant that some of
   the more liberal networks experience congestion collapse [RFC3714],
   they can change their minds and use re-ECN to apply tighter controls
   in order to bring congestion back under control.

   Re-ECN reduces the need for complex network equipment to perform
   these functions.

1.5.  The Rest of this Document

   This document is structured as follows.  First the motivation for the
   new protocol is given (Section 3) followed by the incentive framework
   that is possible with the protocol Section 4.  Section 5 then
   describes other important applications re-ECN, such as policing DDoS,
   QoS and congestion control.  Although these applications do not
   require standardisation themselves, they are described in a fair
   degree of detail in order to explain how re-ECN can be used.  Given
   re-ECN proposes to use the last undefined bit in the IPv4 header, we
   felt it necessary to outline the potential that re-ECN could release
   in return for being given that bit.

   Deployment issues discussed throughout the document are brought
   together in Section 7, which is followed by a brief section
   explaining the somewhat subtle rationale for the design from an
   architectural perspective (Section 8).  We end by describing related
   work (Section 9), listing security considerations (Section 10) and
   finally drawing conclusions (Section 12).

2.  Requirements notation

   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].

   This document first specifies a protocol, then describes a framework
   that creates the right incentives to ensure compliance to the
   protocol.  This could cause confusion because the second part of the
   document considers many cases where malicious nodes may not comply
   with the protocol.  When such contingencies are described, if any of
   the above keywords are not capitalised, that is deliberate.  So, for
   instance, the following two apparently contradictory sentences would
   be perfectly consistent: i) x MUST do this; ii) x may not do this.



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3.  Motivation

3.1.  Policing Congestion Response

3.1.1.  The Policing Problem

   The current Internet architecture trusts hosts to respond voluntarily
   to congestion.  Limited evidence shows that the large majority of
   end-points on the Internet comply with a TCP-friendly response to
   congestion.  But telephony (and increasingly video) services over the
   best effort Internet are attracting the interest of major commercial
   operations.  Most of these applications do not respond to congestion
   at all.  Those that can switch to lower rate codecs.

   Of course, the Internet is intended to support many different
   application behaviours.  But the problem is that this freedom can be
   exercised irresponsibly.  The greater problem is that we will never
   be able to agree on where the boundary is between responsible and
   irresponsible.  Therefore re-ECN is designed to allow different
   networks to set their own view of the limit to irresponsibility, and
   to allow networks that choose a more conservative limit to push back
   against congestion caused in more liberal networks.

   As an example of the impossibility of setting a standard for
   fairness, mandating TCP-friendliness would set the bar too high for
   unresponsive streaming media, but still some would say the bar was
   too low [relax-fairness].  Even though all known peer-to-peer
   filesharing applications are TCP-compatible, they can cause a
   disproportionate amount of congestion, simply by using multiple flows
   and by transferring data continuously relative to other short-lived
   sessions.  On the other hand, if we swung the other way and set the
   bar low enough to allow streaming media to be unresponsive, we would
   also allow denial of service attacks, which are typically
   unresponsive to congestion and consist of multiple continuous flows.

   Applications that need (or choose) to be unresponsive to congestion
   can effectively take (some would say steal) whatever share of
   bottleneck resources they want from responsive flows.  Whether or not
   such free-riding is common, inability to prevent it increases the
   risk of poor returns for investors in network infrastructure, leading
   to under-investment.  An increasing proportion of unresponsive or
   free-riding demand coupled with persistent under-supply is a broken
   economic cycle.  Therefore, if the current, largely co-operative
   consensus continues to erode, congestion collapse could become more
   common in more areas of the Internet [RFC3714].

   While we have designed re-ECN so that networks can choose to deploy
   stringent policing, this does not imply we advocate that every



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   network should introduce tight controls on those that cause
   congestion.  Re-ECN has been specifically designed to allow different
   networks to choose how conservative or liberal they wish to be with
   respect to policing congestion.  But those that choose to be
   conservative can protect themselves from the excesses that liberal
   networks allow their users.

3.1.2.  The Case Against Bottleneck Policing

   The state of the art in rate policing is the bottleneck policer,
   which is intended to be deployed at any forwarding resource that may
   become congested.  Its aim is to detect flows that cause
   significantly more local congestion than others.  Although operators
   might solve their immediate problems by deploying bottleneck
   policers, we are concerned that widespread deployment would make it
   extremely hard to evolve new application behaviours.  We believe the
   IETF should offer re-ECN as the preferred protocol on which to base
   solutions to the policing problems of operators, because it would not
   harm evolvability and, frankly, it would be far more effective (see
   later for why).

   Approaches like [XCHOKe] & [pBox] are nice approaches for rate
   policing traffic without the benefit of whole path information (such
   as could be provided by re-ECN).  But they must be deployed at
   bottlenecks in order to work.  Unfortunately, a large proportion of
   traffic traverses at least two bottlenecks (in two access networks),
   particularly with the current traffic mix where peer-to-peer file-
   sharing is prevalent.  If ECN were deployed, we believe it would be
   likely that these bottleneck policers would be adapted to combine ECN
   congestion marking from the upstream path with local congestion
   knowledge.  But then the only useful placement for such policers
   would be close to the egress of the internetwork.

   But then, if these bottleneck policers were widely deployed (which
   would require them to be more effective than they are now), the
   Internet would find itself with one universal rate adaptation policy
   (probably TCP-friendliness) embedded throughout the network.  Given
   TCP's congestion control algorithm is already known to be hitting its
   scalability limits and new algorithms are being developed for high-
   speed congestion control, embedding TCP policing into the Internet
   would make evolution to new algorithms extremely painful.  If a
   source wanted to use a different algorithm, it would have to first
   discover then negotiate with all the policers on its path,
   particularly those in the far access network.  The IETF has already
   traveled that path with the Intserv architecture and found it
   constrains scalability [RFC2208].

   Anyway, if bottleneck policers were ever widely deployed, they would



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   be likely to be bypassed by determined attackers.  They inherently
   have to police fairness per flow or per source-destination pair.
   Therefore they can easily be circumvented either by opening multiple
   flows (by varying the end-point port number); or by spoofing the
   source address but arranging with the receiver to hide the true
   return address at a higher layer.

4.  Re-ECN Incentive Framework

   The aim is to create an incentive environment that ensures optimal
   sharing of capacity despite everyone acting selfishly (including
   lying and cheating).  Of course, the mechanisms put in place for this
   can lie dormant wherever co-operation is the norm.

4.1.  Revealing Congestion Along the Path

   Throughout this document we focus on path congestion.  But some forms
   of fairness, particularly TCP's, also depend on round trip time.  If
   TCP-fairness is required, we also propose to measure downstream path
   delay using re-feedback.  We give a simple outline of how this could
   work in Appendix D.  However, we do not expect this to be necessary,
   as researchers tend to agree that only congestion control dynamics
   need to depend on RTT, not the rate that the algorithm would converge
   on after a period of stability.

   Recall that re-ECN can be used to measure path congestion at any
   point on the path.  End-systems know the whole path congestion.  The
   receiver knows this by the ratio of negative packets to all other
   packets it observes.  The sender knows this same information via the
   feedback.





















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       +---+  +----+                +----+  +---+
       | S |--| Q1 |----------------| Q2 |--| R |
       +---+  +----+                +----+  +---+
         .      .                      .      .
       ^ .      .                      .      .
       | .      .                      .      .
       | .     positive fraction       .      .
    3% |-------------------------------+=======
       | .      .                      |      .
    2% | .      .                      |      .
       | .      .  negative fraction   |      .
    1% | .      +----------------------+      .
       | .      |                      .      .
    0% +--------------------------------------->
         ^          ^                      ^
         L          M                      N    Observation points


                  Figure 1: A 2-Queue Example (Imprecise)

   Figure 1 uses a simple network to illustrate how re-ECN allows queues
   to measure downstream congestion.  The receiver counts negative
   packets as being 3% of all received packets.  This fraction is fed
   back to the sender.  The sender sets 3% of its packets to be positive
   to match this.  This fraction of positive packets can be observed
   along the path.  This is shown by the horizontal line at 3% in the
   figure.  The negative fraction is shown by the stepped line which
   rises to meet the positive fraction line with steps at at each queue
   where packets are marked negative.  Two queues are shown (Q1 and Q2)
   that are currently congested.  Each time packets pass through a
   fraction are marked red; 1% at Q1 and 2% at Q2).  The approximate
   downstream congestion can be measured at the observation points shown
   along the path by subtracting the negative fraction from the positive
   fraction, as shown in the table below.  [Re-TCP] [ref other document]
   derives these approximations from a precise analysis).

           +-------------------+------------------------------+
           | Observation point | Approx downstream congestion |
           +-------------------+------------------------------+
           |         L         |         3% - 0% = 3%         |
           |         M         |         3% - 1% = 2%         |
           |         N         |         3% - 3% = 0%         |
           +-------------------+------------------------------+

   Table 1: Downstream Congestion Measured at Example Observation Points

   All along the path, whole-path congestion remains unchanged so it can
   be used as a reference against which to compare upstream congestion.



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   The difference predicts downstream congestion for the rest of the
   path.  Therefore, measuring the fractions of negative and positive
   packets at any point in the Internet will reveal upstream, downstream
   and whole path congestion.

   Note: to be absolutely clear these fractions are averages that would
   result from the behaviour of the protocol handler mechanically
   sending positive packets in direct response to incoming feedback---we
   are not saying any protocol handler has to work with these average
   fractions directly.

4.1.1.  Positive and Negative Flows

   In section Section 1.2 we introduced the notion of IP packets having
   different values (negative, positive, cautious, cancelled and
   neutral).  So positive and cautious packets have a value of +1,
   negative -1, and cancelled and neutral have zero value.

   In the rest of this document we will loosely talk of positive or
   negative flows.  A negative flow is one where more negative bytes
   than positive bytes arrive at the reciever.  Likewise positive flows
   are where more positive bytes arrive than negative bytes.  Both of
   these indicate that the wrong amount of positive bytes have been
   sent.

4.2.  Incentive Framework Overview

   Figure 2 sketches the incentive framework that we will describe piece
   by piece throughout this section.  We will do a first pass in
   overview, then return to each piece in detail.  We re-use the earlier
   example of how downstream congestion is derived by subtracting
   upstream congestion from path congestion (Figure 1) but depict
   multiple trust boundaries to turn it into an internetwork.  For
   clarity, only downstream congestion is shown (the difference between
   the two earlier plots).  The graph displays downstream path
   congestion seen in a typical flow as it traverses an example path
   from sender S to receiver R, across networks N1, N2 & N3.  Everyone
   is shown using re-ECN correctly, but we intend to show why everyone
   would /choose/ to use it correctly, and honestly.

   Three main types of self-interest can be identified:

   o  Users want to transmit data across the network as fast as
      possible, paying as little as possible for the privilege.  In this
      respect, there is no distinction between senders and receivers,
      but we must be wary of potential malice by one on the other;





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   o  Network operators want to maximise revenues from the resources
      they invest in.  They compete amongst themselves for the custom of
      users.

   o  Attackers (whether users or networks) want to use any opportunity
      to subvert the new re-ECN system for their own gain or to damage
      the service of their victims, whether targeted or random.



          policer                        dropper
           |                                |
           |                                |
         S <-----N1----> <---N2---> <---N3--> R    domain
                        |          |
                        |          |
                      Border Gateways



                       Figure 2: Incentive Framework

   Source congestion control:  We want to ensure that the sender will
      throttle its rate as downstream congestion increases.  Whatever
      the agreed congestion response (whether TCP-compatible or some
      enhanced QoS), to some extent it will always be against the
      sender's interest to comply.

   Ingress policing:  But it is in all the network operators' interests
      to encourage fair congestion response, so that their investments
      are employed to satisfy the most valuable demand.  The re-ECN
      protocol ensures packets carry the necessary information about
      their own expected downstream congestion so that N1 can deploy a
      policer at its ingress to check that S1 is complying with whatever
      congestion control it should be using (Section 4.4).  If N1 is
      extremely conservative it could police each flow, but it is likely
      to just police the bulk amount of congestion each customer causes
      without regard to flows, or if it is extremely liberal it need not
      police congestion control at all.  Whatever, it is always
      preferable to police traffic at the very first ingress into an
      internetwork, before non-compliant traffic can cause any damage.

   Edge egress dropper:  If the policer ensures the source has less
      right to a high rate the higher it declares downstream congestion,
      the source has a clear incentive to understate downstream
      congestion.  But, if flows of packets are understated when they
      enter the internetwork, they will have become negative by the time
      they leave.  So, we introduce a dropper at the last network



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      egress, which drops packets in flows that persistently declare
      negative downstream congestion (see Section 4.3 for details).

   Inter-domain traffic policing:  But next we must ask, if congestion
      arises downstream (say in N3), what is the ingress network's
      (N1's) incentive to police its customers' response?  If N1 turns a
      blind eye, its own customers benefit while other networks suffer.
      This is why all inter-domain QoS architectures (e.g. Intserv,
      Diffserv) police traffic each time it crosses a trust boundary.
      We have already shown that re-ECN gives a trustworthy measure of
      the expected downstream congestion that a flow will cause by
      subtracting negative volume from positive at any intermediate
      point on a path.  N3 (say) can use this measure to police all the
      responses to congestion of all the sources beyond its upstream
      neighbour (N2), but in bulk with one very simple passive
      mechanism, rather than per flow, as we will now explain.

   Emulating policing with inter-domain congestion penalties:  Between
      high-speed networks, we would rather avoid per-flow policing, and
      we would rather avoid holding back traffic while it is policed.
      Instead, once re-ECN has arranged headers to carry downstream
      congestion honestly, N2 can contract to pay N3 penalties in
      proportion to a single bulk count of the congestion metrics
      crossing their mutual trust boundary (Section 4.5).  In this way,
      N3 puts pressure on N2 to suppress downstream congestion, for
      every flow passing through the border interface, even though they
      will all start and end in different places, and even though they
      may all be allowed different responses to congestion.  The figure
      depicts this downward pressure on N2 by the solid downward arrow
      at the egress of N2.  Then N2 has an incentive either to police
      the congestion response of its own ingress traffic (from N1) or to
      emulate policing by applying penalties to N1 in turn on the basis
      of congestion counted at their mutual boundary.  In this recursive
      way, the incentives for each flow to respond correctly to
      congestion trace back with each flow precisely to each source,
      despite the mechanism not recognising flows (see Section 5.2).

   Inter-domain congestion charging diversity:  Any two networks are
      free to agree any of a range of penalty regimes between themselves
      but they would only provide the right incentives if they were
      within the following reasonable constraints.  N2 should expect to
      have to pay penalties to N3 where penalties monotonically increase
      with the volume of congestion and negative penalties are not
      allowed.  For instance, they may agree an SLA with tiered
      congestion thresholds, where higher penalties apply the higher the
      threshold that is broken.  But the most obvious (and useful) form
      of penalty is where N3 levies a charge on N2 proportional to the
      volume of downstream congestion N2 dumps into N3.  In the



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      explanation that follows, we assume this specific variant of
      volume charging between networks - charging proportionate to the
      volume of congestion.

      We must make clear that we are not advocating that everyone should
      use this form of contract.  We are well aware that the IETF tries
      to avoid standardising technology that depends on a particular
      business model.  And we strongly share this desire to encourage
      diversity.  But our aim is merely to show that border policing can
      at least work with this one model, then we can assume that
      operators might experiment with the metric in other models (see
      Section 4.5 for examples).  Of course, operators are free to
      complement this usage element of their charges with traditional
      capacity charging, and we expect they will as predicted by
      economics.

   No congestion charging to users:  Bulk congestion penalties at trust
      boundaries are passive and extremely simple, and lose none of
      their per-packet precision from one boundary to the next (unlike
      Diffserv all-address traffic conditioning agreements, which
      dissipate their effectiveness across long topologies).  But at any
      trust boundary, there is no imperative to use congestion charging.
      Traditional traffic policing can be used, if the complexity and
      cost is preferred.  In particular, at the boundary with end
      customers (e.g. between S and N1), traffic policing will most
      likely be more appropriate.  Policer complexity is less of a
      concern at the edge of the network.  And end-customers are known
      to be highly averse to the unpredictability of congestion
      charging.

   NOTE WELL:  This document neither advocates nor requires congestion
      charging for end customers and advocates but does not require
      inter-domain congestion charging.

   Competitive discipline of inter-domain traffic engineering:  With
      inter-domain congestion charging, a domain seems to have a
      perverse incentive to fake congestion; N2's profit depends on the
      difference between congestion at its ingress (its revenue) and at
      its egress (its cost).  So, overstating internal congestion seems
      to increase profit.  However, smart border routing [Smart_rtg] by
      N1 will bias its routing towards the least cost routes.  So, N2
      risks losing all its revenue to competitive routes if it
      overstates congestion (see Section 5.3).  In other words, if N2 is
      the least congested route, its ability to raise excess profits is
      limited by the congestion on the next least congested route.






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   Closing the loop:  All the above elements conspire to trap everyone
      between two opposing pressures, ensuring the downstream congestion
      metric arrives at the destination neither above nor below zero.
      So, we have arrived back where we started in our argument.  The
      ingress edge network can rely on downstream congestion declared in
      the packet headers presented by the sender.  So it can police the
      sender's congestion response accordingly.

   Evolvability of congestion control:  We have seen that re-ECN enables
      policing at the very first ingress.  We have also seen that, as
      flows continue on their path through further networks downstream,
      re-ECN removes the need for further per-domain ingress policing of
      all the different congestion responses allowed to each different
      flow.  This is why the evolvability of re-ECN policing is so
      superior to bottleneck policing or to any policing of different
      QoS for different flows.  Even if all access networks choose to
      conservatively police congestion per flow, each will want to
      compete with the others to allow new responses to congestion for
      new types of application.  With re-ECN, each can introduce new
      controls independently, without coordinating with other networks
      and without having to standardise anything.  But, as we have just
      seen, by making inter-domain penalties proportionate to bulk
      downtream congestion, downstream networks can be agnostic to the
      specific congestion response for each flow, but they can still
      apply more penalty the more liberal the ingress access network has
      been in the response to congestion it allowed for each flow.

   We now take a second pass over the incentive framework, filling in
   the detail.

4.3.  Egress Dropper

   As traffic leaves the last network before the receiver (domain N3 in
   Figure 2), the fraction of positive octets in a flow should match the
   fraction of negative octets introduced by congestion marking (red
   packets), leaving a balance of zero.  If it is less (a negative
   flow), it implies that the source is understating path congestion
   (which will reduce the penalties that N2 owes N3).

   If flows are positive, N3 need take no action---this simply means its
   upstream neighbour is paying more penalties than it needs to, and the
   source is going slower than it needs to.  But, to protect itself
   against persistently negative flows, N3 will need to install a
   dropper at its egress.  Appendix A gives a suggested algorithm for
   this dropper.  There is no intention that the dropper algorithm needs
   to be standardised, it is merely provided to show that an efficient,
   robust algorithm is possible.  But whatever algorithm is used must
   meet the criteria below:



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   o  It SHOULD introduce minimal false positives for honest flows;

   o  It SHOULD quickly detect and sanction dishonest flows (minimal
      false negatives);

   o  It SHOULD be invulnerable to state exhaustion attacks from
      malicious sources.  For instance, if the dropper uses flow-state,
      it should not be possible for a source to send numerous packets,
      each with a different flow ID, to force the dropper to exhaust its
      memory capacity (rationale for SHOULD: Continuously sending keep-
      alive packets might be perfectly reasonable behaviour, so we can't
      distinguish a deliberate attack from reasonable levels of such
      behaviour.  Therefore it is strictly impossible to be invulnerable
      to such an attack);

   o  It MUST introduce sufficient loss in goodput so that malicious
      sources cannot play off losses in the egress dropper against
      higher allowed throughput.  Salvatori [CLoop_pol] describes this
      attack, which involves the source understating path congestion
      then inserting forward error correction (FEC) packets to
      compensate expected losses;

   o  It MUST NOT be vulnerable to `identity whitewashing', where a
      transport can label a flow with a new ID more cheaply than paying
      the cost of continuing to use its current ID.

   Note that the dropper operates on flows but we would like it not to
   require per-flow state.  This is why we have been careful to ensure
   that all flows MUST start with a cautious packet.  If a flow does not
   start with a cautious packet, a dropper is likely to treat it
   unfavourably.  This risk makes it worth sending a cautious packet at
   the start of a flow, even though there is a cost to the sender of
   doing so (positive `worth').  Indeed, with cautious packets, the rate
   at which a sender can generate new flows can be limited (Appendix B).
   In this respect, cautious packets work like Handley's state set-up
   bit [Steps_DoS].

   Appendix A also gives an example dropper implementation that
   aggregates flow state.  Dropper algorithms will often maintain a
   moving average across flows of the fraction of positive packets.
   When maintaining an average across flows, a dropper SHOULD only allow
   flows into the average if they start with a cautious packet, but it
   SHOULD NOT include cautious packets in the positive packet average.
   A sender sends cautious packets when it does not have the benefit of
   feedback from the receiver.  So, counting cautious packets would be
   likely to make the average unnecessarily positive, providing headroom
   (or should we say footroom?) for dishonest (negative) traffic.




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   If the dropper detects a persistently negative flow, it SHOULD drop
   sufficient negative and neutral packets to force the flow to not be
   negative.  Drops SHOULD be focused on just sufficient packets in
   misbehaving flows to remove the negative bias while doing minimal
   extra harm.

4.4.  Ingress Policing

   Access operators who wish to limit the congeston that a sender is
   able to cause can deploy policers at the very first ingress to the
   internetwork.  Re-ECN has been designed to avoid the need for
   bottleneck policing so that we can avoid a future where a single rate
   adaptation policy is embedded throughout the network.  Instead, re-
   ECN allows the particular rate adaptation policy to be solely agreed
   bilaterally between the sender and its ingress access provider ([ref
   other document] discusses possible ways to signal between them),
   which allows congestion control to be policed, but maintains its
   evolvability, requiring only a single, local box to be updated.

   Appendix B gives examples of per-user policing algorithms.  But there
   is no implication that these algorithms are to be standardised, or
   that they are ideal.  The ingress rate policer is the part of the re-
   ECN incentive framework that is intended to be the most flexible.
   Once endpoint protocol handlers for re-ECN and egress droppers are in
   place, operators can choose exactly which congestion response they
   want to police, and whether they want to do it per user, per flow or
   not at all.

   The re-ECN protocol allows these ingress policers to easily perform
   bulk per-user policing (Appendix B.1).  This is likely to provide
   sufficient incentive to the user to correctly respond to congestion
   without needing the policing function to be overly complex.  If an
   access operator chose they could use per-flow policing according to
   the widely adopted TCP rate adaptation ( Appendix B.2) or other
   alternatives, however this would introduce extra complexity to the
   system.

   If a per-flow rate policer is used, it should use path (not
   downstream) congestion as the relevant metric, which is represented
   by the fraction of octets in packets with positive (positive and
   cautious packets) and cancelled packets.  Of course, re-ECN provides
   all the information a policer needs directly in the packets being
   policed.  So, even policing TCP's AIMD algorithm is relatively
   straightforward (Appendix B.2).

   Note that we have included cancelled packets in the measure of path
   congestion. cancelled packets arise when the sender sends a positive
   packet in response to feedback, but then this positive packet just



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   happens to be congestion marked itself.  One would not normally
   expect many cancelled packets at the first ingress because one would
   not normally expect much congestion marking to have been necessary
   that soon in the path.  However, a home network or campus network may
   well sit between the sending endpoint and the ingress policer, so
   some congestion may occur upstream of the policer.  And if congestion
   does occur upstream, some cancelled packets should be visible, and
   should be taken into account in the measure of path congestion.

   But a much more important reason for including cancelled packets in
   the measure of path congestion at an ingress policer is that a sender
   might otherwise subvert the protocol by sending cancelled packets
   instead of neutral packets.  Like neutral, cancelled packets are
   worth zero, so the sender knows they won't be counted against any
   quota it might have been allowed.  But unlike neutral packets,
   cancelled packets are immune to congestion marking, because they have
   already been congestion marked.  So, it is both correct and useful
   that cancelled packets should be included in a policer's measure of
   path congestion, as this removes the incentive the sender would
   otherwise have to mark more packets as cancelled than it should.

   An ingress policer should also ensure that flows are not already
   negative when they enter the access network.  As with cancelled
   packets, the presence of negative packets will typically be unusual.
   Therefore it will be easy to detect negative flows at the ingress by
   just detecting negative packets then monitoring the flow they belong
   to.

   Of course, even if the sender does operate its own network, it may
   arrange not to congestion mark traffic.  Whether the sender does this
   or not is of no concern to anyone else except the sender.  Such a
   sender will not be policed against its own network's contribution to
   congestion, but the only resulting problem would be overload in the
   sender's own network.

   Finally, we must not forget that an easy way to circumvent re-ECN's
   defences is for the source to turn off re-ECN support, by setting the
   Not-RECT codepoint, implying RFC3168 compliant traffic.  Therefore an
   ingress policer should put a general rate-limit on Not-RECT traffic,
   which SHOULD be lax during early, patchy deployment, but will have to
   become stricter as deployment widens.  Similarly, flows starting
   without a cautious packet can be confined by a strict rate-limit used
   for the remainder of flows that haven't proved they are well-behaved
   by starting correctly (therefore they need not consume any flow
   state---they are just confined to the `misbehaving' bin if they carry
   an unrecognised flow ID).





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4.5.  Inter-domain Policing

   One of the main design goals of re-ECN is for border security
   mechanisms to be as simple as possible, otherwise they will become
   the pinch-points that limit scalability of the whole internetwork.
   We want to avoid per-flow processing at borders and to keep to
   passive mechanisms that can monitor traffic in parallel to
   forwarding, rather than having to filter traffic inline---in series
   with forwarding.  Such passive, off-line mechanisms are essential for
   future high-speed all-optical border interconnection where packets
   cannot be buffered while they are checked for policy compliance.

   So far, we have been able to keep the border mechanisms simple,
   despite having had to harden them against some subtle attacks on the
   re-ECN design.  The mechanisms are still passive and avoid per-flow
   processing.

   The basic accounting mechanism at each border interface simply
   involves accumulating the volume of packets with positive worth
   (positive and cautious packets), and subtracting the volume of those
   with negative worth (red packets).  Even though this mechanism takes
   no regard of flows, over an accounting period (say a month) this
   subtraction will account for the downstream congestion caused by all
   the flows traversing the interface, wherever they come from, and
   wherever they go to.  The two networks can agree to use this metric
   however they wish to determine some congestion-related penalty
   against the upstream network.  Although the algorithm could hardly be
   simpler, it is spelled out using pseudo-code in Appendix C.1.

   Various attempts to subvert the re-ECN design have been made.  In all
   cases their root cause is persistently negative flows.  But, after
   describing these attacks we will show that we don't actually have to
   get rid of all persistently negative flows in order to thwart the
   attacks.

   In honest flows, downstream congestion is measured as positive minus
   negative volume.  So if all flows are honest (i.e. not persistently
   negative), adding all positive volume and all negative volume without
   regard to flows will give an aggregate measure of downstream
   congestion.  But such simple aggregation is only possible if no flows
   are persistently negative.  Unless persistently negative flows are
   completely removed, they will reduce the aggregate measure of
   congestion.  The aggregate may still be positive overall, but not as
   positive as it would have been had the negative flows been removed.

   In Section 4.3 we discussed how to sanction traffic to remove, or at
   least to identify, persistently negative flows.  But, even if the
   sanction for negative traffic is to discard it, unless it is



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   discarded at the exact point it goes negative, it will wrongly
   subtract from aggregate downstream congestion, at least at any
   borders it crosses after it has gone negative but before it is
   discarded.

   We rely on sanctions to deter dishonest understatement of congestion.
   But even the ultimate sanction of discard can only be effective if
   the sender is bothered about the data getting through to its
   destination.  A number of attacks have been identified where a sender
   gains from sending dummy traffic or it can attack someone or
   something using dummy traffic even though it isn't communicating any
   information to anyone:

   o  A host can send traffic with no positive packets towards its
      intended destination, aiming to transmit as much traffic as any
      dropper will allow [Bauer06].  It may add forward error correction
      (FEC) to repair as much drop as it experiences.

   o  A host can send dummy traffic into the network with no positive
      packets and with no intention of communicating with anyone, but
      merely to cause higher levels of congestion for others who do want
      to communicate (DoS).  So, to ride over the extra congestion,
      everyone else has to spend more of whatever rights to cause
      congestion they have been allowed.

   o  A network can simply create its own dummy traffic to congest
      another network, perhaps causing it to lose business at no cost to
      the attacking network.  This is a form of denial of service
      perpetrated by one network on another.  The preferential drop
      measures in [ref other document] provide crude protection against
      such attacks, but we are not overly worried about more accurate
      prevention measures, because it is already possible for networks
      to DoS other networks on the general Internet, but they generally
      don't because of the grave consequences of being found out.  We
      are only concerned if re-ECN increases the motivation for such an
      attack, as in the next example.

   o  A network can just generate negative traffic and send it over its
      border with a neighbour to reduce the overall penalties that it
      should pay to that neighbour.  It could even initialise the TTL so
      it expired shortly after entering the neighbouring network,
      reducing the chance of detection further downstream.  This attack
      need not be motivated by a desire to deny service and indeed need
      not cause denial of service.  A network's main motivator would
      most likely be to reduce the penalties it pays to a neighbour.
      But, the prospect of financial gain might tempt the network into
      mounting a DoS attack on the other network as well, given the gain
      would offset some of the risk of being detected.



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   The first step towards a solution to all these problems with negative
   flows is to be able to estimate the contribution they make to
   downstream congestion at a border and to correct the measure
   accordingly.  Although ideally we want to remove negative flows
   themselves, perhaps surprisingly, the most effective first step is to
   cancel out the polluting effect negative flows have on the measure of
   downstream congestion at a border.  It is more important to get an
   unbiased estimate of their effect, than to try to remove them all.  A
   suggested algorithm to give an unbiased estimate of the contribution
   from negative flows to the downstream congestion measure is given in
   Appendix C.2.

   Although making an accurate assessment of the contribution from
   negative flows may not be easy, just the single step of neutralising
   their polluting effect on congestion metrics removes all the gains
   networks could otherwise make from mounting dummy traffic attacks on
   each other.  This puts all networks on the same side (only with
   respect to negative flows of course), rather than being pitched
   against each other.  The network where this flow goes negative as
   well as all the networks downstream lose out from not being
   reimbursed for any congestion this flow causes.  So they all have an
   interest in getting rid of these negative flows.  Networks forwarding
   a flow before it goes negative aren't strictly on the same side, but
   they are disinterested bystanders---they don't care that the flow
   goes negative downstream, but at least they can't actively gain from
   making it go negative.  The problem becomes localised so that once a
   flow goes negative, all the networks from where it happens and beyond
   downstream each have a small problem, each can detect it has a
   problem and each can get rid of the problem if it chooses to.  But
   negative flows can no longer be used for any new attacks.

   Once an unbiased estimate of the effect of negative flows can be
   made, the problem reduces to detecting and preferably removing flows
   that have gone negative as soon as possible.  But importantly,
   complete eradication of negative flows is no longer critical---best
   endeavours will be sufficient.

   For instance, let us consider the case where a source sends traffic
   with no positive packets at all, hoping to at least get as much
   traffic delivered as network-based droppers will allow.  The flow is
   likely to go at least slightly negative in the first network on the
   path (N1 if we use the example network layout in Figure 2).  If all
   networks use the algorithm in Appendix C.2 to inflate penalties at
   their border with an upstream network, they will remove the effect of
   negative flows.  So, for instance, N2 will not be paying a penalty to
   N1 for this flow.  Further, because the flow contributes no positive
   packets at all, a dropper at the egress will completely remove it.




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   The remaining problem is that every network is carrying a flow that
   is causing congestion to others but not being held to account for the
   congestion it is causing.  Whenever the fail-safe border algorithm
   (Section 4.6) or the border algorithm to compensate for negative
   flows (Appendix C.2) detects a negative flow, it can instantiate a
   focused dropper for that flow locally.  It may be some time before
   the flow is detected, but the more strongly negative the flow is, the
   more quickly it will be detected by the fail-safe algorithm.  But, in
   the meantime, it will not be distorting border incentives.  Until it
   is detected, if it contributes to drop anywhere, its packets will
   tend to be dropped before others if queues use the preferential drop
   rules in [ref other document], which discriminate against non-
   positive packets.  All networks below the point where a flow goes
   negative (N1, N2 and N3 in this case) have an incentive to remove
   this flow, but the queue where it first goes negative (in N1) can of
   course remove the problem for everyone downstream.

   In the case of DDoS attacks, Section 5.1 describes how re-ECN
   mitigates their force.

4.6.  Inter-domain Fail-safes

   The mechanisms described so far create incentives for rational
   network operators to behave.  That is, one operator aims to make
   another behave responsibly by applying penalties and expects a
   rational response (i.e. one that trades off costs against benefits).
   It is usually reasonable to assume that other network operators will
   behave rationally (policy routing can avoid those that might not).
   But this approach does not protect against the misconfigurations and
   accidents of other operators.

   Therefore, we propose the following two mechanisms at a network's
   borders to provide "defence in depth".  Both are similar:

   Highly positive flows:  A small sample of positive packets should be
      picked randomly as they cross a border interface.  Then subsequent
      packets matching the same source and destination address and DSCP
      should be monitored.  If the fraction of positive packets is well
      above a threshold (to be determined by operational practice), a
      management alarm SHOULD be raised, and the flow MAY be
      automatically subject to focused drop.

   Persistently negative flows:  A small sample of congestion marked
      (red) packets should be picked randomly as they cross a border
      interface.  Then subsequent packets matching the same source and
      destination address and DSCP should be monitored.  If the balance
      of positive packets minus negative packets (measured in bytes) is
      persistently negative, a management alarm SHOULD be raised, and



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      the flow MAY be automatically subject to focused drop.

   Both these mechanisms rely on the fact that highly positive (or
   negative) flows will appear more quickly in the sample by selecting
   randomly solely from positive (or negative) packets.

4.7.  The Case against Classic Feedback

   A system that produces an optimal outcome as a result of everyone's
   selfish actions is extremely powerful.  Especially one that enables
   evolvability of congestion control.  But why do we have to change to
   re-ECN to achieve it?  Can't classic congestion feedback (as used
   already by standard ECN) be arranged to provide similar incentives
   and similar evolvability?  Superficially it can.  Kelly's seminal
   work showed how we can allow everyone the freedom to evolve whatever
   congestion control behaviour is in their application's best interest
   but still optimise the whole system of networks and users by placing
   a price on congestion to ensure responsible use of this
   freedom [Evol_cc]).  Kelly used ECN with its classic congestion
   feedback model as the mechanism to convey congestion price
   information.  The mechanism could be thought of as volume charging;
   except only the volume of packets marked with congestion experienced
   (CE) was counted.

   However, below we explain why relying on classic feedback /required/
   congestion charging to be used, while re-ECN achieves the same
   powerful outcome (given it is built on Kelly's foundations), but does
   not /require/ congestion charging.  In brief, the problem with
   classic feedback is that the incentives have to trace the indirect
   path back to the sender---the long way round the feedback loop.  For
   example, if classic feedback were used in Figure 2, N2 would have had
   to influence N1 via all of N3, R & S rather than directly.

   Inability to agree what is happening downstream:  In order to police
      its upstream neighbour's congestion response, the neighbours
      should be able to agree on the congestion to be responded to.
      Whatever the feedback regime, as packets change hands at each
      trust boundary, any path metrics they carry are verifiable by both
      neighbours.  But, with a classic path metric, they can only agree
      on the /upstream/ path congestion.

   Inaccessible back-channel:  The network needs a whole-path congestion
      metric if it wants to control the source.  Classically, whole path
      congestion emerges at the destination, to be fed back from
      receiver to sender in a back-channel.  But, in any data network,
      back-channels need not be visible to relays, as they are
      essentially communications between the end-points.  They may be
      encrypted, asymmetrically routed or simply omitted, so no network



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      element can reliably intercept them.  The congestion charging
      literature solves this problem by charging the receiver and
      assuming this will cause the receiver to refer the charges to the
      sender.  But, of course, this creates unintended side-effects...

   `Receiver pays' unacceptable:  In connectionless datagram networks,
      receivers and receiving networks cannot prevent reception from
      malicious senders, so `receiver pays' opens them to `denial of
      funds' attacks.

   End-user congestion charging unacceptable in many societies:  Even if
      'denial of funds' were not a problem, we know that end-users are
      highly averse to the unpredictability of congestion charging and
      anyway, we want to avoid restricting network operators to just one
      retail tariff.  But with classic feedback only an upstream metric
      is available, so we cannot avoid having to wrap the `receiver
      pays' money flow around the feedback loop, necessarily forcing
      end-users to be subjected to congestion charging.

   To summarise so far, with classic feedback, policing congestion
   response without losing evolvability /requires/ congestion charging
   of end-users and a `receiver pays' model, whereas, with re-ECN, it is
   still possible to influence incentives using congestion charging but
   using the safer `sender pays' model.  However, congestion charging is
   only likely to be appropriate between domains.  So, without losing
   evolvability, re-ECN enables technical policing mechanisms that are
   more appropriate for end users than congestion pricing.

4.8.  Simulations

   Simulations of policer and dropper performance done for the multi-bit
   version of re-feedback have been included in section 5 "Dropper
   Performance" of [Re-fb].  Simulations of policer and dropper for the
   re-ECN version described in this document are work in progress.

5.  Other Applications of Re-ECN

5.1.  DDoS Mitigation

   A flooding attack is inherently about congestion of a resource.
   Because re-ECN ensures the sources causing network congestion
   experience the cost of their own actions, it acts as a first line of
   defence against DDoS.  As load focuses on a victim, upstream queues
   grow, requiring honest sources to pre-load packets with a higher
   fraction of positive packets.  Once downstream queues are so
   congested that they are dropping traffic, they will be marking to
   negative the traffic they do forward 100%.  Honest sources will
   therefore be sending positive packets 100% (and therefore being



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   severely rate-limited at the ingress).

   Senders under malicious control can either do the same as honest
   sources, and be rate-limited at ingress, or they can understate
   congestion by sending more neutral RECT packets than they should.  If
   sources understate congestion (i.e. do not re-echo sufficient
   positive packets) and the preferential drop ranking is implemented on
   queues ([ref othe document]), these queues will preserve positive
   traffic until last.  So, the neutral traffic from malicious sources
   will all be automatically dropped first.  Either way, the malicious
   sources cannot send more than honest sources.

   Further, hosts under malicious control will tend to be re-used for
   many different attacks.  They will therefore build up a long term
   history of causing congestion.  Therefore, as long as the population
   of potentially compromisable hosts around the Internet is limited,
   the per-user policing algorithms in Appendix B.1 will gradually
   throttle down zombies and other launchpads for attacks.  Therefore,
   widespread deployment of re-ECN could considerably dampen the force
   of DDoS.  Certainly, zombie armies could hold their fire for long
   enough to be able to build up enough credit in the per-user policers
   to launch an attack.  But they would then still be limited to no more
   throughput than other, honest users.

   Inter-domain traffic policing (see Section 4.5)ensures that any
   network that harbours compromised `zombie' hosts will have to bear
   the cost of the congestion caused by traffic from zombies in
   downstream networks.  Such networks will be incentivised to deploy
   per-user policers that rate-limit hosts that are unresponsive to
   congestion so they can only send very slowly into congested paths.
   As well as protecting other networks, the extremely poor performance
   at any sign of congestion will incentivise the zombie's owner to
   clean it up.  However, the host should behave normally when using
   uncongested paths.

   Uniquely, re-ECN handles DDoS traffic without relying on the validity
   of identifiers in packets.  Certainly the egress dropper relies on
   uniqueness of flow identifiers, but not their validity.  So if a
   source spoofs another address, re-ECN works just as well, as long as
   the attacker cannot imitate all the flow identifiers of another
   active flow passing through the same dropper (see Section 6).
   Similarly, the ingress policer relies on uniqueness of flow IDs, not
   their validity.  Because a new flow will only be allowed any rate at
   all if it starts with a cautious packet, and the more cautious
   packets there are starting new flows, the more they will be limited.
   Essentially a re-ECN policer limits the bulk of all congestion
   entering the network through a physical interface; limiting the
   congestion caused by each flow is merely an optional extra.



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5.2.  End-to-end QoS

   {ToDo: (Section 3.3.2 of [Re-fb] entitled `Edge QoS' gives an outline
   of the text that will be added here).}

5.3.  Traffic Engineering

   Classic feedback makes congestion-based traffic engineering
   inefficient too.  Network N3 can see which of its two alternative
   upstream networks N2 and N3 are less congested.  But it is N1 that
   makes the routing decision.  This is why current traffic engineering
   requires a continuous message stream from congestion monitors to the
   routing controller.  And even then the monitors can only be trusted
   for /intra-/domain traffic engineering.  The trustworthiness of re-
   ECN enables /inter-/domain traffic engineering without messaging
   overhead. {ToDo: Elaborate}

5.4.  Inter-Provider Service Monitoring

   {ToDo: }

6.  Limitations

   {ToDo:See also: slide of limitations}

   The known limitations of the re-ECN approach are:

   o  We still cannot defend against the attack described in Section 10
      where a malicious source sends negative traffic through the same
      egress dropper as another flow and imitates its flow identifiers,
      allowing a malicious source to cause an innocent flow to
      experience heavy drop.

   o  Re-feedback for TTL (re-TTL) would also be desirable at the same
      time as re-ECN.  Unfortunately this requires a further standards
      action for the mechanisms briefly described in Appendix D

   o  Traffic must be ECN-capable for re-ECN to be effective.  The only
      defence against malicious users who turn off ECN capbility is that
      networks are expected to rate limit Not-ECT traffic and to apply
      higher drop preference to it during congestion.  Although these
      are blunt instruments, they at least represent a feasible scenario
      for the future Internet where Not-ECT traffic co-exists with re-
      ECN traffic, but as a severely hobbled under-class.  We recommend
      (Section 7.1) that while accommodating a smooth initial transition
      to re-ECN, policing policies should gradually be tightened to rate
      limit Not-ECT traffic more strictly in the longer term.




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   o  When checking whether a flow is balancing positive packets with
      negative packets (measured in bytes), re-ECN can only account for
      congestion marking, not drops.  So, whenever a sender experiences
      drop, it does not have to re-echo the congestion event by sending
      positive packet(s).  Nonetheless, it is hardly any advantage to be
      able to send faster than other flows only if your traffic is
      dropped and the other traffic isn't.

   o  We are considering the issue of whether it would be useful to
      truncate rather than drop packets that appear to be malicious, so
      that the feedback loop is not broken but useful data can be
      removed.

   {ToDo: Monopolies over Routes}

7.  Incremental Deployment

7.1.  Incremental Deployment Features

   The design of the re-ECN protocol started from the fact that the
   current ECN marking behaviour of queues was sufficient and that re-
   feedback could be introduced around these queues by changing the
   sender behaviour but not the routers.  Otherwise, if we had required
   routers to be changed, the chance of encountering a path that had
   every router upgraded would be vanishly small during early
   deployment, giving no incentive to start deployment.  Also, as there
   is no new forwarding behaviour, routers and hosts do not have to
   signal or negotiate anything.

   However, networks that choose to protect themselves using re-ECN do
   have to add new security functions at their trust boundaries with
   others.  They distinguish legacy traffic by its ECN field.  Traffic
   from Not-ECT transports is distinguishable by its Not-ECT marking .
   Traffic from RFC3168 compliant ECN transports is distinguished from
   re-ECN by which of ECT(0) or ECT(1) is used.  We chose to use ECT(1)
   for re-ECN traffic deliberately.  Existing ECN sources set ECT(0) on
   either 50% (the nonce) or 100% (the default) of packets, whereas re-
   ECN does not use ECT(0) at all.  We can use this distinguishing
   feature of RFC3168 compliant ECN traffic to separate it out for
   different treatment at the various border security functions: egress
   dropping, ingress policing and border policing.

   The general principle we adopt is that an egress dropper will not
   drop any legacy traffic, but ingress and border policers will limit
   the bulk rate of legacy traffic (Not-ECT, ECT(0) and those amrked
   with the unused codepoint as defined in [Re-TCP]) that can enter each
   network.  Then, during early re-ECN deployment, operators can set
   very permissive (or non-existent) rate-limits on legacy traffic, but



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   once re-ECN implementations are generally available, legacy traffic
   can be rate-limited increasingly harshly.  Ultimately, an operator
   might choose to block all legacy traffic entering its network, or at
   least only allow through a trickle.

   Then, as the limits are set more strictly, the more RFC3168 ECN
   sources will gain by upgrading to re-ECN.  Thus, towards the end of
   the voluntary incremental deployment period, RFC3168 compliant
   transports can be given progressively stronger encouragement to
   upgrade.

7.2.  Incremental Deployment Incentives

   It would only be worth standardising the re-ECN protocol if there
   existed a coherent story for how it might be incrementally deployed.
   In order for it to have a chance of deployment, everyone who needs to
   act must have a strong incentive to act, and the incentives must
   arise in the order that deployment would have to happen.  Re-ECN
   works around unmodified ECN routers, but we can't just discuss why
   and how re-ECN deployment might build on ECN deployment, because
   there is precious little to build on in the first place.  Instead, we
   aim to show that re-ECN deployment could carry ECN with it.  We focus
   on commercial deployment incentives, although some of the arguments
   apply equally to academic or government sectors.

   ECN deployment:

      ECN is largely implemented in commercial routers, but generally
      not as a supported feature, and it has largely not been deployed
      by commercial network operators.  ECN has been implemented in most
      Unix-based operating systems for some time.  Microsoft first
      implemented ECN in Windows Vista, but it is only on by default for
      the server end of a TCP connection.  Unfortunately the client end
      had to be turned off by default, because a non-zero ECN field
      triggers a bug in a legacy home gateway which makes it crash.  For
      detailed deployment status, see [ECN-Deploy].  We believe the
      reason ECN deployment has not happened is twofold:

      *  ECN requires changes to both routers and hosts.  If someone
         wanted to sell the improvement that ECN offers, they would have
         to co-ordinate deployment of their product with others.  An ECN
         server only gives any improvement on an ECN network.  An ECN
         network only gives any improvement if used by ECN devices.
         Deployment that requires co-ordination adds cost and delay and
         tends to dilute any competitive advantage that might be gained.

      *  ECN `only' gives a performance improvement.  Making a product a
         bit faster (whether the product is a device or a network),



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         isn't usually a sufficient selling point to be worth the cost
         of co-ordinating across the industry to deploy it.  Network
         operators tend to avoid re-configuring a working network unless
         launching a new product.

   ECN and Re-ECN for Edge-to-edge Assured QoS:

      We believe the proposal to provide assured QoS sessions using a
      form of ECN called pre-congestion notification (PCN) [RFC5559] is
      most likely to break the deadlock in ECN deployment first.  It
      only requires edge-to-edge deployment so it does not require
      endpoint support.  It can be deployed in a single network, then
      grow incrementally to interconnected networks.  And it provides a
      different `product' (internetworked assured QoS), rather than
      merely making an existing product a bit faster.

      Not only could this assured QoS application kick-start ECN
      deployment, it could also carry re-ECN deployment with it; because
      re-ECN can enable the assured QoS region to expand to a large
      internetwork where neighbouring networks do not trust each other.
      [Re-PCN] argues that re-ECN security should be built in to the QoS
      system from the start, explaining why and how.

      If ECN and re-ECN were deployed edge-to-edge for assured QoS,
      operators would gain valuable experience.  They would also clear
      away many technical obstacles such as firewall configurations that
      block all but the RFC3168 settings of the ECN field and the RE
      flag.

   ECN in Access Networks:

      The next obstacle to ECN deployment would be extension to access
      and backhaul networks, where considerable link layer differences
      makes implementation non-trivial, particularly on congested
      wireless links.  ECN and re-ECN work fine during partial
      deployment, but they will not be very useful if the most congested
      elements in networks are the last to support them.  Access network
      support is one of the weakest parts of this deployment story.  All
      we can hope is that, once the benefits of ECN are better
      understood by operators, they will push for the necessary link
      layer implementations as deployment proceeds.

   Policing Unresponsive Flows:

      Re-ECN allows a network to offer differentiated quality of service
      as explained in Section 5.2.  But we do not believe this will
      motivate initial deployment of re-ECN, because the industry is
      already set on alternative ways of doing QoS.  Despite being much



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      more complicated and expensive, the alternative approaches are
      here and now.

      But re-ECN is critical to QoS deployment in another respect.  It
      can be used to prevent applications from taking whatever bandwidth
      they choose without asking.

      Currently, applications that remain resolute in their lack of
      response to congestion are rewarded by other TCP applications.  In
      other words, TCP is naively friendly, in that it reduces its rate
      in response to congestion whether it is competing with friends
      (other TCPs) or with enemies (unresponsive applications).

      Therefore, those network owners that want to sell QoS will be keen
      to ensure that their users can't help themselves to QoS for free.
      Given the very large revenues at stake, we believe effective
      policing of congestion response will become highly sought after by
      network owners.

      But this does not necessarily argue for re-ECN deployment.
      Network owners might choose to deploy bottleneck policers rather
      than re-ECN-based policing.  However, under Related Work
      (Section 9) we argue that bottleneck policers are inherently
      vulnerable to circumvention.

      Therefore we believe there will be a strong demand from network
      owners for re-ECN deployment so they can police flows that do not
      ask to be unresponsive to congestion, in order to protect their
      revenues from flows that do ask (QoS).  In particular, we suspect
      that the operators of cellular networks will want to prevent VoIP
      and video applications being used freely on their networks as a
      more open market develops in GPRS and 3G devices.

      Initial deployments are likely to be isolated to single cellular
      networks.  Cellular operators would first place requirements on
      device manufacturers to include re-ECN in the standards for mobile
      devices.  In parallel, they would put out tenders for ingress and
      egress policers.  Then, after a while they would start to tighten
      rate limits on Not-ECT traffic from non-standard devices and they
      would start policing whatever non-accredited applications people
      might install on mobile devices with re-ECN support in the
      operating system.  This would force even independent mobile device
      manufacturers to provide re-ECN support.  Early standardisation
      across the cellular operators is likely, including interconnection
      agreements with penalties for excess downstream congestion.






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      We suspect some fixed broadband networks (whether cable or DSL)
      would follow a similar path.  However, we also believe that larger
      parts of the fixed Internet would not choose to police on a per-
      flow basis.  Some might choose to police congestion on a per-user
      basis in order to manage heavy peer-to-peer file-sharing, but it
      seems likely that a sizeable majority would not deploy any form of
      policing.

      This hybrid situation begs the question, "How does re-ECN work for
      networks that choose to using policing if they connect with others
      that don't?"  Traffic from non-ECN capable sources will arrive
      from other networks and cause congestion within the policed, ECN-
      capable networks.  So networks that chose to police congestion
      would rate-limit Not-ECT traffic throughout their network,
      particularly at their borders.  They would probably also set
      higher usage prices in their interconnection contracts for
      incoming Not-ECT and Not-RECT traffic.  We assume that
      interconnection contracts between networks in the same tier will
      include congestion penalties before contracts with provider
      backbones do.

      A hybrid situation could remain for all time.  As was explained in
      the introduction, we believe in healthy competition between
      policing and not policing, with no imperative to convert the whole
      world to the religion of policing.  Networks that chose not to
      deploy egress droppers would leave themselves open to being
      congested by senders in other networks.  But that would be their
      choice.

      The important aspect of the egress dropper though is that it most
      protects the network that deploys it.  If a network does not
      deploy an egress dropper, sources sending into it from other
      networks will be able to understate the congestion they are
      causing.  Whereas, if a network deploys an egress dropper, it can
      know how much congestion other networks are dumping into it, and
      apply penalties or charges accordingly.  So, whether or not a
      network polices its own sources at ingress, it is in its interests
      to deploy an egress dropper.

   Host support:

      In the above deployment scenario, host operating system support
      for re-ECN came about through the cellular operators demanding it
      in device standards (i.e. 3GPP).  Of course, increasingly, mobile
      devices are being built to support multiple wireless technologies.
      So, if re-ECN were stipulated for cellular devices, it would
      automatically appear in those devices connected to the wireless
      fringes of fixed networks if they coupled cellular with WiFi or



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      Bluetooth technology, for instance.  Also, once implemented in the
      operating system of one mobile device, it would tend to be found
      in other devices using the same family of operating system.

      Therefore, whether or not a fixed network deployed ECN, or
      deployed re-ECN policers and droppers, many of its hosts might
      well be using re-ECN over it.  Indeed, they would be at an
      advantage when communicating with hosts across re-ECN policed
      networks that rate limited Not-RECT traffic.

   Other possible scenarios:

      The above is thankfully not the only plausible scenario we can
      think of.  One of the many clubs of operators that meet regularly
      around the world might decide to act together to persuade a major
      operating system manufacturer to implement re-ECN.  And they may
      agree between them on an interconnection model that includes
      congestion penalties.

      Re-ECN provides an interesting opportunity for device
      manufacturers as well as network operators.  Policers can be
      configured loosely when first deployed.  Then as re-ECN take-up
      increases, they can be tightened up, so that a network with re-ECN
      deployed can gradually squeeze down the service provided to
      RFC3168 compliant devices that have not upgraded to re-ECN.  Many
      device vendors rely on replacement sales.  And operating system
      companies rely heavily on new release sales.  Also support
      services would like to be able to force stragglers to upgrade.
      So, the ability to throttle service to RFC3168 compliant operating
      systems is quite valuable.

      Also, policing unresponsive sources may not be the only or even
      the first application that drives deployment.  It may be policing
      causes of heavy congestion (e.g. peer-to-peer file-sharing).  Or
      it may be mitigation of denial of service.  Or we may be wrong in
      thinking simpler QoS will not be the initial motivation for re-ECN
      deployment.  Indeed, the combined pressure for all these may be
      the motivator, but it seems optimistic to expect such a level of
      joined-up thinking from today's communications industry.  We
      believe a single application alone must be a sufficient motivator.

      In short, everyone gains from adding accountability to TCP/IP,
      except the selfish or malicious.  So, deployment incentives tend
      to be strong.







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8.  Architectural Rationale

   In the Internet's technical community, the danger of not responding
   to congestion is well-understood, as well as its attendant risk of
   congestion collapse [RFC3714].  However, one side of the Internet's
   commercial community considers that the very essence of IP is to
   provide open access to the internetwork for all applications.  They
   see congestion as a symptom of over-conservative investment, and rely
   on revising application designs to find novel ways to keep
   applications working despite congestion.  They argue that the
   Internet was never intended to be solely for TCP-friendly
   applications.  Meanwhile, another side of the Internet's commercial
   community believes that it is worthwhile providing a network for
   novel applications only if it has sufficient capacity, which can
   happen only if a greater share of application revenues can be
   /assured/ for the infrastructure provider.  Otherwise the major
   investments required would carry too much risk and wouldn't happen.

   The lesson articulated in [Tussle] is that we shouldn't embed our
   view on these arguments into the Internet at design time.  Instead we
   should design the Internet so that the outcome of these arguments can
   get decided at run-time.  Re-ECN is designed in that spirit.  Once
   the protocol is available, different network operators can choose how
   liberal they want to be in holding people accountable for the
   congestion they cause.  Some might boldly invest in capacity and not
   police its use at all, hoping that novel applications will result.
   Others might use re-ECN for fine-grained flow policing, expecting to
   make money selling vertically integrated services.  Yet others might
   sit somewhere half-way, perhaps doing coarse, per-user policing.  All
   might change their minds later.  But re-ECN always allows them to
   interconnect so that the careful ones can protect themselves from the
   liberal ones.

   The incentive-based approach used for re-ECN is based on Gibbens and
   Kelly's arguments [Evol_cc] on allowing endpoints the freedom to
   evolve new congestion control algorithms for new applications.  They
   ensured responsible behaviour despite everyone's self-interest by
   applying pricing to ECN marking, and Kelly had proved stability and
   optimality in an earlier paper.

   Re-ECN keeps all the underlying economic incentives, but rearranges
   the feedback.  The idea is to allow a network operator (if it
   chooses) to deploy engineering mechanisms like policers at the front
   of the network which can be designed to behave /as if/ they are
   responding to congestion prices.  Rather than having to subject users
   to congestion pricing, networks can then use more traditional
   charging regimes (or novel ones).  But the engineering can constrain
   the overall amount of congestion a user can cause.  This provides a



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   buffer against completely outrageous congestion control, but still
   makes it easy for novel applications to evolve if they need different
   congestion control to the norms.  It also allows novel charging
   regimes to evolve.

   Despite being achieved with a relatively minor protocol change, re-
   ECN is an architectural change.  Previously, Internet congestion
   could only be controlled by the data sender, because it was the only
   one both in a position to control the load and in a position to see
   information on congestion.  Re-ECN levels the playing field.  It
   recognises that the network also has a role to play in moderating
   (policing) congestion control.  But policing is only truly effective
   at the first ingress into an internetwork, whereas path congestion
   was previously only visible at the last egress.  So, re-ECN
   democratises congestion information.  Then the choice over who
   actually controls congestion can be made at run-time, not design
   time---a bit like an aircraft with dual controls.  And different
   operators can make different choices.  We believe non-architectural
   approaches to this problem are unlikely to offer more than partial
   solutions (see Section 9).

   Importantly, re-ECN does not require assumptions about specific
   congestion responses to be embedded in any network elements, except
   at the first ingress to the internetwork if that level of control is
   desired by the ingress operator.  But such tight policing will be a
   matter of agreement between the source and its access network
   operator.  The ingress operator need not police congestion response
   at flow granularity; it can simply hold a source responsible for the
   aggregate congestion it causes, perhaps keeping it within a monthly
   congestion quota.  Or if the ingress network trusts the source, it
   can do nothing.

   Therefore, the aim of the re-ECN protocol is NOT solely to police
   TCP-friendliness.  Re-ECN preserves IP as a generic network layer for
   all sorts of responses to congestion, for all sorts of transports.
   Re-ECN merely ensures truthful downstream congestion information is
   available in the network layer for all sorts of accountability
   applications.

   The end to end design principle does not say that all functions
   should be moved out of the lower layers---only those functions that
   are not generic to all higher layers.  Re-ECN adds a function to the
   network layer that is generic, but was omitted: accountability for
   causing congestion.  Accountability is not something that an end-user
   can provide to themselves.  We believe re-ECN adds no more than is
   sufficient to hold each flow accountable, even if it consists of a
   single datagram.




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   "Accountability" implies being able to identify who is responsible
   for causing congestion.  However, at the network layer it would NOT
   be useful to identify the cause of congestion by adding individual or
   organisational identity information, NOR by using source IP
   addresses.  Rather than bringing identity information to the point of
   congestion, we bring downstream congestion information to the point
   where the cause can be most easily identified and dealt with.  That
   is, at any trust boundary congestion can be associated with the
   physically connected upstream neighbour that is directly responsible
   for causing it (whether intentionally or not).  A trust boundary
   interface is exactly the place to police or throttle in order to
   directly mitigate congestion, rather than having to trace the
   (ir)responsible party in order to shut them down.

   Some considered that ECN itself was a layering violation.  The
   reasoning went that the interface to a layer should provide a service
   to the higher layer and hide how the lower layer does it.  However,
   ECN reveals the state of the network layer and below to the transport
   layer.  A more positive way to describe ECN is that it is like the
   return value of a function call to the network layer.  It explicitly
   returns the status of the request to deliver a packet, by returning a
   value representing the current risk that a packet will not be served.
   Re-ECN has similar semantics, except the transport layer must try to
   guess the return value, then it can use the actual return value from
   the network layer to modify the next guess.

   The guiding principle behind all the discussion in Section 4.5 on
   Policing is that any gain from subverting the protocol should be
   precisely neutralised, rather than punished.  If a gain is punished
   to a greater extent than is sufficient to neutralise it, it will most
   likely open up a new vulnerability, where the amplifying effect of
   the punishment mechanism can be turned on others.

   For instance, if possible, flows should be removed as soon as they go
   negative, but we do NOT RECOMMEND any attempts to discard such flows
   further upstream while they are still positive.  Such over-zealous
   push-back is unnecessary and potentially dangerous.  These flows have
   paid their `fare' up to the point they go negative, so there is no
   harm in delivering them that far.  If someone downstream asks for a
   flow to be dropped as near to the source as possible, because they
   say it is going to become negative later, an upstream node cannot
   test the truth of this assertion.  Rather than have to authenticate
   such messages, re-ECN has been designed so that flows can be dropped
   solely based on locally measurable evidence.  A message hinting that
   a flow should be watched closely to test for negativity is fine.  But
   not a message that claims that a positive flow will go negative
   later, so it should be dropped. .




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9.  Related Work

   {Due to lack of time, this section is incomplete.  The reader is
   referred to the Related Work section of [Re-fb] for a brief selection
   of related ideas.}

9.1.  Policing Rate Response to Congestion

   ATM network elements send congestion back-pressure
   messages [ITU-T.I.371] along each connection, duplicating any end to
   end feedback because they don't trust it.  On the other hand, re-ECN
   ensures information in forwarded packets can be used for congestion
   management without requiring a connection-oriented architecture and
   re-using the overhead of fields that are already set aside for end to
   end congestion control (and routing loop detection in the case of re-
   TTL in Appendix D).

   We borrowed ideas from policers in the literature [pBox],[XCHOKe],
   AFD etc. for our rate equation policer.  However, without the benefit
   of re-ECN they don't police the correct rate for the condition of
   their path.  They detect unusually high /absolute/ rates, but only
   while the policer itself is congested, because they work by detecting
   prevalent flows in the discards from the local RED queue.  These
   policers must sit at every potential bottleneck, whereas our policer
   need only be located at each ingress to the internetwork.  As Floyd &
   Fall explain [pBox], the limitation of their approach is that a high
   sending rate might be perfectly legitimate, if the rest of the path
   is uncongested or the round trip time is short.  Commercially
   available rate policers cap the rate of any one flow.  Or they
   enforce monthly volume caps in an attempt to control high volume
   file-sharing.  They limit the value a customer derives.  They might
   also limit the congestion customers can cause, but only as an
   accidental side-effect.  They actually punish traffic that fills
   troughs as much as traffic that causes peaks in utilisation.  In
   practice network operators need to be able to allocate service by
   cost during congestion, and by value at other times.

9.2.  Congestion Notification Integrity

   The choice of two ECT code-points in the ECN field [RFC3168]
   permitted future flexibility, optionally allowing the sender to
   encode the experimental ECN nonce [RFC3540] in the packet stream.
   This mechanism has since been included in the specifications of DCCP
   [RFC4340].

   The ECN nonce is an elegant scheme that allows the sender to detect
   if someone in the feedback loop - the receiver especially - tries to
   claim no congestion was experienced when in fact congestion led to



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   packet drops or ECN marks.  For each packet it sends, the sender
   chooses between the two ECT codepoints in a pseudo-random sequence.
   Then, whenever the network marks a packet with CE, if the receiver
   wants to deny congestion happened, she has to guess which ECT
   codepoint was overwritten.  She has only a 50:50 chance of being
   correct each time she denies a congestion mark or a drop, which
   ultimately will give her away.

   The purpose of a network-layer nonce should primarily be protection
   of the network, while a transport-layer nonce would be better used to
   protect the sender from cheating receivers.  Now, the assumption
   behind the ECN nonce is that a sender will want to detect whether a
   receiver is suppressing congestion feedback.  This is only true if
   the sender's interests are aligned with the network's, or with the
   community of users as a whole.  This may be true for certain large
   senders, who are under close scrutiny and have a reputation to
   maintain.  But we have to deal with a more hostile world, where
   traffic may be dominated by peer-to-peer transfers, rather than
   downloads from a few popular sites.  Often the `natural' self-
   interest of a sender is not aligned with the interests of other
   users.  It often wishes to transfer data quickly to the receiver as
   much as the receiver wants the data quickly.

   In contrast, the re-ECN protocol enables policing of an agreed rate-
   response to congestion (e.g. TCP-friendliness) at the sender's
   interface with the internetwork.  It also ensures downstream networks
   can police their upstream neighbours, to encourage them to police
   their users in turn.  But most importantly, it requires the sender to
   declare path congestion to the network and it can remove traffic at
   the egress if this declaration is dishonest.  So it can police
   correctly, irrespective of whether the receiver tries to suppress
   congestion feedback or whether the sender ignores genuine congestion
   feedback.  Therefore the re-ECN protocol addresses a much wider range
   of cheating problems, which includes the one addressed by the ECN
   nonce.

9.3.  Identifying Upstream and Downstream Congestion

   Purple [Purple] proposes that queues should use the CWR flag in the
   TCP header of ECN-capable flows to work out path congestion and
   therefore downstream congestion in a similar way to re-ECN.  However,
   because CWR is in the transport layer, it is not always visible to
   network layer routers and policers.  Purple's motivation was to
   improve AQM, not policing.  But, of course, nodes trying to avoid a
   policer would not be expected to allow CWR to be visible.






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10.  Security Considerations

   {ToDo: enrich this section}{ToDo: Describe attacks by networks on
   flows (and by spoofing sources).} {ToDo: Re-ECN & DNS servers}

   Nearly the whole of this document concerns security.

11.  IANA Considerations

   This memo includes no request to IANA.

12.  Conclusions

   {ToDo:}

13.  Acknowledgements

   Sebastien Cazalet and Andrea Soppera contributed to the idea of re-
   feedback.  All the following have given helpful comments: Andrea
   Soppera, David Songhurst, Peter Hovell, Louise Burness, Phil Eardley,
   Steve Rudkin, Marc Wennink, Fabrice Saffre, Cefn Hoile, Steve Wright,
   John Davey, Martin Koyabe, Carla Di Cairano-Gilfedder, Alexandru
   Murgu, Nigel Geffen, Pete Willis, John Adams (BT), Sally Floyd
   (ICIR), Joe Babiarz, Kwok Ho-Chan (Nortel), Stephen Hailes, Mark
   Handley (who developed the attack with cancelled packets), Adam
   Greenhalgh (who developed the attack on DNS) (UCL), Jon Crowcroft
   (Uni Cam), David Clark, Bill Lehr, Sharon Gillett, Steve Bauer (who
   complemented our own dummy traffic attacks with others), Liz Maida
   (MIT), and comments from participants in the CRN/CFP Broadband and
   DoS-resistant Internet working groups.A special thank you to
   Alessandro Salvatori for coming up with fiendish attacks on re-ECN.

14.  Comments Solicited

   Comments and questions are encouraged and very welcome.  They can be
   addressed to the IETF Transport Area working group's mailing list
   <tsvwg@ietf.org>, and/or to the authors.

15.  References

15.1.  Normative References

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

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



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15.2.  Informative References

   [Bauer06]         Bauer, S., Faratin, P., and R. Beverly, "Assessing
                     the assumptions underlying mechanism design for the
                     Internet", Proc. Workshop on the Economics of
                     Networked Systems (NetEcon06) , June 2006, <http://
                     www.cs.duke.edu/nicl/netecon06/papers/
                     ne06-assessing.pdf>.

   [CLoop_pol]       Salvatori, A., "Closed Loop Traffic Policing",
                     Politecnico Torino and Institut Eurecom Masters
                     Thesis , September 2005.

   [ECN-Deploy]      Floyd, S., "ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification)
                     in TCP/IP; Implementation and Deployment of ECN",
                     Web-page , May 2004, <http://www.icir.org/floyd/
                     ecn.html#implementations>.

   [Evol_cc]         Gibbens, R. and F. Kelly, "Resource pricing and the
                     evolution of congestion control",
                     Automatica 35(12)1969--1985, December 1999, <http:/
                     /www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
                     S0005109899001351>.

   [ITU-T.I.371]     ITU-T, "Traffic Control and Congestion Control in
                     B-ISDN", ITU-T Rec. I.371 (03/04), March 2004.

   [Jiang02]         Jiang, H. and D. Dovrolis, "The Macroscopic
                     Behavior of the TCP Congestion Avoidance
                     Algorithm", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 32(3)75-88, July 2002,
                     <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/571697.571725>.

   [Mathis97]        Mathis, M., Semke, J., Mahdavi, J., and T. Ott,
                     "The Macroscopic Behavior of the TCP Congestion
                     Avoidance Algorithm", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 27(3)67--82,
                     July 1997,
                     <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/263932.264023>.

   [Purple]          Pletka, R., Waldvogel, M., and S. Mannal, "PURPLE:
                     Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing
                     Congestion Information", Proc. Local Computer
                     Networks (LCN 2003) , October 2003.

   [RFC2208]         Mankin, A., Baker, F., Braden, B., Bradner, S.,
                     O'Dell, M., Romanow, A., Weinrib, A., and L. Zhang,
                     "Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) Version 1
                     Applicability Statement Some Guidelines on
                     Deployment", RFC 2208, September 1997.



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   [RFC3514]         Bellovin, S., "The Security Flag in the IPv4
                     Header", RFC 3514, April 2003.

   [RFC3540]         Spring, N., Wetherall, D., and D. Ely, "Robust
                     Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Signaling
                     with Nonces", RFC 3540, June 2003.

   [RFC3714]         Floyd, S. and J. Kempf, "IAB Concerns Regarding
                     Congestion Control for Voice Traffic in the
                     Internet", RFC 3714, March 2004.

   [RFC4340]         Kohler, E., Handley, M., and S. Floyd, "Datagram
                     Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)", RFC 4340,
                     March 2006.

   [RFC4341]         Floyd, S. and E. Kohler, "Profile for Datagram
                     Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion
                     Control ID 2: TCP-like Congestion Control",
                     RFC 4341, March 2006.

   [RFC4342]         Floyd, S., Kohler, E., and J. Padhye, "Profile for
                     Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)
                     Congestion Control ID 3: TCP-Friendly Rate Control
                     (TFRC)", RFC 4342, March 2006.

   [RFC5559]         Eardley, P., "Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN)
                     Architecture", RFC 5559, June 2009.

   [Re-PCN]          Briscoe, B., "Emulating Border Flow Policing using
                     Re-PCN on Bulk Data",
                     draft-briscoe-re-pcn-border-cheat-03 (work in
                     progress), October 2009.

   [Re-TCP]          Briscoe, B., Jacquet, A., Moncaster, T., and A.
                     Smith, "Re-ECN: Adding Accountability for Causing
                     Congestion to TCP/IP",
                     draft-briscoe-conex-re-ecn-tcp-03 (work in
                     progress), March 2014.

   [Re-fb]           Briscoe, B., Jacquet, A., Di Cairano-Gilfedder, C.,
                     Salvatori, A., Soppera, A., and M. Koyabe,
                     "Policing Congestion Response in an Internetwork
                     Using Re-Feedback", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 35(4)277--288,
                     August 2005, <http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/
                     sigcomm2005/techprog.html#session8>.

   [Savage99]        Savage, S., Cardwell, N., Wetherall, D., and T.
                     Anderson, "TCP congestion control with a



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                     misbehaving receiver", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 29(5),
                     October 1999,
                     <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/savage99tcp.html>.

   [Smart_rtg]       Goldenberg, D., Qiu, L., Xie, H., Yang, Y., and Y.
                     Zhang, "Optimizing Cost and Performance for
                     Multihoming", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 34(4)79--92,
                     October 2004,
                     <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/698472.html>.

   [Steps_DoS]       Handley, M. and A. Greenhalgh, "Steps towards a
                     DoS-resistant Internet Architecture", Proc. ACM
                     SIGCOMM workshop on Future directions in network
                     architecture (FDNA'04) pp 49--56, August 2004.

   [Tussle]          Clark, D., Sollins, K., Wroclawski, J., and R.
                     Braden, "Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's
                     Internet", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 32(4)347--356,
                     October 2002, <http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/
                     sigcomm2002/papers/tussle.pdf>.

   [XCHOKe]          Chhabra, P., Chuig, S., Goel, A., John, A., Kumar,
                     A., Saran, H., and R. Shorey, "XCHOKe: Malicious
                     Source Control for Congestion Avoidance at Internet
                     Gateways", Proceedings of IEEE International
                     Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP-02) ,
                     November 2002,
                     <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~akumar/xchoke.pdf>.

   [pBox]            Floyd, S. and K. Fall, "Promoting the Use of End-
                     to-End Congestion Control in the Internet", IEEE/
                     ACM Transactions on Networking 7(4) 458--472,
                     August 1999, <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/
                     abs_all.jsp?arnumber=793002>.

   [relax-fairness]  Briscoe, B., Moncaster, T., and L. Burness,
                     "Problem Statement: Transport Protocols Don't Have
                     To Do Fairness",
                     draft-briscoe-tsvwg-relax-fairness-01 (work in
                     progress), July 2008.

Appendix A.  Example Egress Dropper Algorithm

   {ToDo: Write up the basic algorithm with flow state, then the
   aggregated one.}






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Appendix B.  Policer Designs to ensure Congestion Responsiveness

B.1.  Per-user Policing

   User policing requires a policer on the ingress interface of the
   access router associated with the user.  At that point, the traffic
   of the user hasn't diverged on different routes yet; nor has it mixed
   with traffic from other sources.

   In order to ensure that a user doesn't generate more congestion in
   the network than her due share, a modified bulk token-bucket is
   maintained with the following parameter:

   o  b_0 the initial token level

   o  r the filling rate

   o  b_max the bucket depth

   The same token bucket algorithm is used as in many areas of
   networking, but how it is used is very different:

   o  all traffic from a user over the lifetime of their subscription is
      policed in the same token bucket.

   o  only positive and cancelled packets (positive, cautious and
      cancelled) consume tokens

   Such a policer will allow network operators to throttle the
   contribution of their users to network congestion.  This will require
   the appropriate contractual terms to be in place between operators
   and users.  For instance: a condition for a user to subscribe to a
   given network service may be that she should not cause more than a
   volume C_user of congestion over a reference period T_user, although
   she may carry forward up to N_user times her allowance at the end of
   each period.  These terms directly set the parameter of the user
   policer:

   o  b_0 = C_user

   o  r = C_user/T_user

   o  b_max = b_0 * (N_user +1)

   Besides the congestion budget policer above, another user policer may
   be necessary to further rate-limit cautious packets, if they are to
   be marked rather than dropped (see discussion in [ref other
   document].).  Rate-limiting cautious packets will prevent high bursts



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   of new flow arrivals, which is a very useful feature in DoS
   prevention.  A condition to subscribe to a given network service
   would have to be that a user should not generate more than C_cautious
   cautious packets, over a reference period T_cautious, with no option
   to carry forward any of the allowance at the end of each period.
   These terms directly set the parameters of the cautious packet
   policer:

   o  b_0 = C_cautious

   o  r = C_cautious/T_cautious

   o  b_max = b_0

   T_cautious should be a much shorter period than T_user: for instance
   T_cautious could be in the order of minutes while T_user could be in
   order of weeks.

B.2.  Per-flow Rate Policing

   Whilst we believe that simple per-user policing would be sufficient
   to ensure senders comply with congestion control, some operators may
   wish to police the rate response of each flow to congestion as well.
   Although we do not believe this will be neceesary, we include this
   section to show how one could perform per-flow policing using
   enforcement of TCP-fairness as an example.  Per-flow policing aims to
   enforce congestion responsiveness on the shortest information
   timescale on a network path: packet roundtrips.

   This again requires that the appropriate terms be agreed between a
   network operator and its users, where a congestion responsiveness
   policy might be required for the use of a given network service
   (perhaps unless the user specifically requests otherwise).

   As an example, we describe below how a rate adaptation policer can be
   designed when the applicable rate adaptation policy is TCP-
   compliance.  In that context, the average throughput of a flow will
   be expected to be bounded by the value of the TCP throughput during
   congestion avoidance, given in Mathis' formula [Mathis97]

      x_TCP = k * s / ( T * sqrt(m) )

   where:

   o  x_TCP is the throughput of the TCP flow in packets per second,

   o  k is a constant upper-bounded by sqrt(3/2),




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   o  s is the average packet size of the flow,

   o  T is the roundtrip time of the flow,

   o  m is the congestion level experienced by the flow.

   We define the marking period N=1/m which represents the average
   number of packets between two positive or cancelled packets.  Mathis'
   formula can be re-written as:

      x_TCP = k*s*sqrt(N)/T

   We can then get the average inter-mark time in a compliant TCP flow,
   dt_TCP, by solving (x_TCP/s)*dt_TCP = N which gives

      dt_TCP = sqrt(N)*T/k

   We rely on this equation for the design of a rate-adaptation policer
   as a variation of a token bucket.  In that case a policer has to be
   set up for each policed flow.  This may be triggered by cautious
   packets, with the remainder of flows being all rate limited together
   if they do not start with a cautious packet.

   Where maintaining per flow state is not a problem, for instance on
   some access routers, systematic per-flow policing may be considered.
   Should per-flow state be more constrained, rate adaptation policing
   could be limited to a random sample of flows exhibiting positive or
   cancelled packets.

   As in the case of user policing, only positive or cancelled packets
   will consume tokens, however the amount of tokens consumed will
   depend on the congestion signal.

   When a new rate adaptation policer is set up for flow j, the
   following state is created:

   o  a token bucket b_j of depth b_max starting at level b_0

   o  a timestamp t_j = timenow()

   o  a counter N_j = 0

   o  a roundtrip estimate T_j

   o  a filling rate r

   When the policing node forwards a packet of flow j with no positive
   packets:



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   o  . the counter is incremented: N_j += 1

   When the policing node forwards a packet of flow j carrying a
   negative packet:

   o  the counter is incremented: N_j += 1

   o  the token level is adjusted: b_j += r*(timenow()-t_j) - sqrt(N_j)*
      T_j/k

   o  the counter is reset: N_j = 0

   o  the timer is reset: t_j = timenow()

   An implementation example will be given in a later draft that avoids
   having to extract the square root.

   Analysis: For a TCP flow, for r= 1 token/sec, on average,

      r*(timenow()-t_j)-sqrt(N_j)* T_j/k = dt_TCP - sqrt(N)*T/k = 0

   This means that the token level will fluctuate around its initial
   level.  The depth b_max of the bucket sets the timescale on which the
   rate adaptation policy is performed while the filling rate r sets the
   trade-off between responsiveness and robustness:

   o  the higher b_max, the longer it will take to catch greedy flows

   o  the higher r, the fewer false positives (greedy verdict on
      compliant flows) but the more false negatives (compliant verdict
      on greedy flows)

   This rate adaptation policer requires the availability of a roundtrip
   estimate which may be obtained for instance from the application of
   re-feedback to the downstream delay Appendix D or passive estimation
   [Jiang02].

   When the bucket of a policer located at the access router (whether it
   is a per-user policer or a per-flow policer) becomes empty, the
   access router SHOULD drop at least all packets causing the token
   level to become negative.  The network operator MAY take further
   sanctions if the token level of the per-flow policers associated with
   a user becomes negative.

Appendix C.  Downstream Congestion Metering Algorithms






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C.1.  Bulk Downstream Congestion Metering Algorithm

   To meter the bulk amount of downstream congestion in traffic crossing
   an inter-domain border an algorithm is needed that accumulates the
   size of positive packets and subtracts the size of negative packets.
   We maintain two counters:

      V_b: accumulated congestion volume

      B: total data volume (in case it is needed)

   A suitable pseudo-code algorithm for a border router is as follows:

   ====================================================================
   V_b = 0
   B   = 0
   for each Re-ECN-capable packet {
       b = readLength(packet)      /* set b to packet size          */
       B += b                      /* accumulate total volume       */
       if readEECN(packet) == (positive || cautious {
           V_b += b                /* increment...                  */
       } elseif readEECN(packet) == negative {
           V_b -= b                /* ...or decrement V_b...        */
       }                           /*...depending on EECN field     */
   }
   ====================================================================

   At the end of an accounting period this counter V_b represents the
   congestion volume that penalties could be applied to, as described in
   Section 4.5.

   For instance, accumulated volume of congestion through a border
   interface over a month might be V_b = 5PB (petabyte = 10^15 byte).
   This might have resulted from an average downstream congestion level
   of 1% on an accumulated total data volume of B = 500PB.

   {ToDo: Include algorithm for precise downstream congestion.}

C.2.  Inflation Factor for Persistently Negative Flows

   The following process is suggested to complement the simple algorithm
   above in order to protect against the various attacks from
   persistently negative flows described in Section 4.5.  As explained
   in that section, the most important and first step is to estimate the
   contribution of persistently negative flows to the bulk volume of
   downstream pre-congestion and to inflate this bulk volume as if these
   flows weren't there.  The process below has been designed to give an
   unbiased estimate, but it may be possible to define other processes



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   that achieve similar ends.

   While the above simple metering algorithm is counting the bulk of
   traffic over an accounting period, the meter should also select a
   subset of the whole flow ID space that is small enough to be able to
   realistically measure but large enough to give a realistic sample.
   Many different samples of different subsets of the ID space should be
   taken at different times during the accounting period, preferably
   covering the whole ID space.  During each sample, the meter should
   count the volume of positive packets and subtract the volume of
   negative, maintaining a separate account for each flow in the sample.
   It should run a lot longer than the large majority of flows, to avoid
   a bias from missing the starts and ends of flows, which tend to be
   positive and negative respectively.

   Once the accounting period finishes, the meter should calculate the
   total of the accounts V_{bI} for the subset of flows I in the sample,
   and the total of the accounts V_{fI} excluding flows with a negative
   account from the subset I. Then the weighted mean of all these
   samples should be taken a_S = sum_{forall I} V_{fI} / sum_{forall I}
   V_{bI}.

   If V_b is the result of the bulk accounting algorithm over the
   accounting period (Appendix C.1) it can be inflated by this factor
   a_S to get a good unbiased estimate of the volume of downstream
   congestion over the accounting period a_S.V_b, without being polluted
   by the effect of persistently negative flows.

Appendix D.  Re-TTL

   This Appendix gives an overview of a proposal to be able to overload
   the TTL field in the IP header to monitor downstream propagation
   delay.  This is included to show that it would be possible to take
   account of RTT if it was deemed desirable.

   Delay re-feedback can be achieved by overloading the TTL field,
   without changing IP or router TTL processing.  A target value for TTL
   at the destination would need standardising, say 16.  If the path hop
   count increased by more than 16 during a routing change, it would
   temporarily be mistaken for a routing loop, so this target would need
   to be chosen to exceed typical hop count increases.  The TCP wire
   protocol and handlers would need modifying to feed back the
   destination TTL and initialise it.  It would be necessary to
   standardise the unit of TTL in terms of real time (as was the
   original intent in the early days of the Internet).

   In the longer term, precision could be improved if routers
   decremented TTL to represent exact propagation delay to the next



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   router.  That is, for a router to decrement TTL by, say, 1.8 time
   units it would alternate the decrement of every packet between 1 & 2
   at a ratio of 1:4.  Although this might sometimes require a seemingly
   dangerous null decrement, a packet in a loop would still decrement to
   zero after 255 time units on average.  As more routers were upgraded
   to this more accurate TTL decrement, path delay estimates would
   become increasingly accurate despite the presence of some RFC3168
   compliant routers that continued to always decrement the TTL by 1.

Appendix E.  Argument for holding back the ECN nonce

   The ECN nonce is a mechanism that allows a /sending/ transport to
   detect if drop or ECN marking at a congested router has been
   suppressed by a node somewhere in the feedback loop---another router
   or the receiver.

   Space for the ECN nonce was set aside in [RFC3168] (currently
   proposed standard) while the full nonce mechanism is specified in
   [RFC3540] (currently experimental).  The specifications for [RFC4340]
   (currently proposed standard) requires that "Each DCCP sender SHOULD
   set ECN Nonces on its packets...".  It also mandates as a requirement
   for all CCID profiles that "Any newly defined acknowledgement
   mechanism MUST include a way to transmit ECN Nonce Echoes back to the
   sender.", therefore:

   o  The CCID profile for TCP-like Congestion Control [RFC4341]
      (currently proposed standard) says "The sender will use the ECN
      Nonce for data packets, and the receiver will echo those nonces in
      its Ack Vectors."

   o  The CCID profile for TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) [RFC4342]
      recommends that "The sender [use] Loss Intervals options' ECN
      Nonce Echoes (and possibly any Ack Vectors' ECN Nonce Echoes) to
      probabilistically verify that the receiver is correctly reporting
      all dropped or marked packets."

   The primary function of the ECN nonce is to protect the integrity of
   the information about congestion: ECN marks and packet drops.
   However, when the nonce is used to protect the integrity of
   information about packet drops, rather than ECN marks, a transport
   layer nonce will always be sufficient (because a drop loses the
   transport header as well as the ECN field in the network header),
   which would avoid using scarce IP header codepoint space.  Similarly,
   a transport layer nonce would protect against a receiver sending
   early acknowledgements [Savage99].

   If the ECN nonce reveals integrity problems with the information
   about congestion, the sending transport can use that knowledge for



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   two functions:

   o  to protect its own resources, by allocating them in proportion to
      the rates that each network path can sustain, based on congestion
      control,

   o  and to protect congested routers in the network, by slowing down
      drastically its connection to the destination with corrupt
      congestion information.

   If the sending transport chooses to act in the interests of congested
   routers, it can reduce its rate if it detects some malicious party in
   the feedback loop may be suppressing ECN feedback.  But it would only
   be useful to congested routers when /all/ senders using them are
   trusted to act in interest of the congested routers.

   In the end, the only essential use of a network layer nonce is when
   sending transports (e.g. large servers) want to allocate their /own/
   resources in proportion to the rates that each network path can
   sustain, based on congestion control.  In that case, the nonce allows
   senders to be assured that they aren't being duped into giving more
   of their own resources to a particular flow.  And if congestion
   suppression is detected, the sending transport can rate limit the
   offending connection to protect its own resources.  Certainly, this
   is a useful function, but the IETF should carefully decide whether
   such a single, very specific case warrants IP header space.

   In contrast, Re-ECN allows all routers to fully protect themselves
   from such attacks, without having to trust anyone - senders,
   receivers, neighbouring networks.  Re-ECN is therefore proposed in
   preference to the ECN nonce on the basis that it addresses the
   generic problem of accountability for congestion of a network's
   resources at the IP layer.

   Delaying the ECN nonce is justified because the applicability of the
   ECN nonce seems too limited for it to consume a two-bit codepoint in
   the IP header.  It therefore seems prudent to give time for an
   alternative way to be found to do the one function the nonce is
   essential for.

   Moreover, while we have re-designed the Re-ECN codepoints so that
   they do not prevent the ECN nonce progressing, the same is not true
   the other way round.  If the ECN nonce started to see some deployment
   (perhaps because it was blessed with proposed standard status),
   incremental deployment of Re-ECN would effectively be impossible,
   because Re-ECN marking fractions at inter-domain borders would be
   polluted by unknown levels of nonce traffic.




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   The authors are aware that Re-ECN must prove it has the potential it
   claims if it is to displace the nonce.  Therefore, every effort has
   been made to complete a comprehensive specification of Re-ECN so that
   its potential can be assessed.  We therefore seek the opinion of the
   Internet community on whether the Re-ECN protocol is sufficiently
   useful to warrant standards action.

Authors' Addresses

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

   Phone: +44 1473 645196
   EMail: bob.briscoe@bt.com
   URI:   http://bobbriscoe.net/


   Arnaud Jacquet
   BT
   B54/70, Adastral Park
   Martlesham Heath
   Ipswich  IP5 3RE
   UK

   Phone: +44 1473 647284
   EMail: arnaud.jacquet@bt.com
   URI:


   Toby Moncaster
   Moncaster.com
   Dukes
   Layer Marney
   Colchester  CO5 9UZ
   UK

   EMail: toby@moncaster.com










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   Alan Smith
   BT
   B54/76, Adastral Park
   Martlesham Heath
   Ipswich  IP5 3RE
   UK

   Phone: +44 1473 640404
   EMail: alan.p.smith@bt.com










































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