Internet Engineering Task Force W. Eddy Internet-Draft J. Dailey Intended status: Standards Track G. Clark Expires: May 25, 2016 MTI Systems November 22, 2015 BGP Flow Specification Packet-Rate Action draft-eddy-idr-flowspec-packet-rate-00 Abstract This document defines a new type of traffic filtering action for the BGP flow specification. The new packet-rate action allows specifying a rate-limit in number of packets per second. 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- 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 May 25, 2016. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2015 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. Eddy, et al. Expires May 25, 2016 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Flowspec Packet-Rate Action November 2015 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Packet Rate Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1. Introduction The existing BGP flow specification [RFC5575] standard supports traffic-rate limits conveyed in bytes per second. In some cases, it may be easier, faster, or more relevant to perform accounting and decision-making based on quantities of packets per second. It is desirable to specify rate limits in terms of the number of packets per second, and not just the number of bytes per second. 1.1. Requirements Language The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119]. 2. Packet Rate Action The traffic filtering actions pertaining to a matched flow specification are indicated using BGP extended communities [RFC7153]. Particular extended community values are defined in RFC 5575 for a number of possible actions. New types of actions can be defined using additional extended community values. The value 0x8006 has been defined as the "traffic-rate" action, and specifies a rate-limit in a quantity of bytes per second. The new packet-rate extended community described in this draft is similar, except the quantity is interpreted as packets per second. +------+--------------------+--------------------------+ | type | extended community | encoding | +------+--------------------+--------------------------+ | TBD | packet-rate | 2-byte as#, 4-byte float | +------+--------------------+--------------------------+ Table 1 Eddy, et al. Expires May 25, 2016 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Flowspec Packet-Rate Action November 2015 Packet-rate: The packet-rate extended community is a transitive extended community across the autonomous-system boundary and uses following extended community encoding: The first two octets carry the 2-octet id, which can be assigned from a 2-byte AS number. When a 4-byte AS number is locally present, the 2 least significant bytes of such an AS number can be used. This value is purely informational and should not be interpreted by the implementation. The remaining 4 octets carry the rate information in IEEE floating point [IEEE.754.1985] format, units being packets per second. A packet-rate of 0 should result on all traffic for the particular flow to be discarded. Note that this is a transitive community type, as explained in RFC 7153 and not a non-transitive type as mentioned narratively in the RFC 5575 description of the traffic-rate action. 3. Discussion Although a floating-point value for packets per second may seem odd or unnatural compared to an integer value, the motivations for this are: The maximum value that a 32-bit unsigned integer could hold would limit to specifying under 2.15 Gpps (2.15 billion packets per second). For large or high-performance networks especially in the future, this may not be sufficient. The maximum floating point value is much higher (on the order of 10^38) and should be future- proof. The reduced precision of the floating-point limit that can be specified compared to an integer encoding does not seem to be a major concern. This maintains consistency with the present syntax for bytes per second rate limits. 4. IANA Considerations If accepted for publication, IANA will need to allocate a BGP extended community value for the "packet-rate" action from the "Generic Transitive Experimental Use Extended Community Sub-Types" registry. Eddy, et al. Expires May 25, 2016 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Flowspec Packet-Rate Action November 2015 5. Security Considerations No security considerations are raised by this document. 6. Normative References [IEEE.754.1985] Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, "Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic", IEEE Standard 754, August 1985. [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC5575] Marques, P., Sheth, N., Raszuk, R., Greene, B., Mauch, J., and D. McPherson, "Dissemination of Flow Specification Rules", RFC 5575, DOI 10.17487/RFC5575, August 2009, . [RFC7153] Rosen, E. and Y. Rekhter, "IANA Registries for BGP Extended Communities", RFC 7153, DOI 10.17487/RFC7153, March 2014, . Authors' Addresses Wesley Eddy MTI Systems Email: wes@mti-systems.com Justin Dailey MTI Systems Email: justin@mti-systems.com Gilbert Clark MTI Systems Email: gclark@mti-systems.com Eddy, et al. Expires May 25, 2016 [Page 4]