Internet DRAFT - draft-perkins-rmcat-rtp-cc-feedback

draft-perkins-rmcat-rtp-cc-feedback







Network Working Group                                      C. S. Perkins
Internet-Draft                                     University of Glasgow
Intended status: Informational                             July 02, 2014
Expires: January 03, 2015


   Using RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) Feedback for Unicast Multimedia
                           Congestion Control
                 draft-perkins-rmcat-rtp-cc-feedback-01

Abstract

   This memo discusses the types of congestion control feedback that it
   is possible to send using the RTP Control Protocol (RTCP), and their
   suitability of use in implementing congestion control for unicast
   multimedia applications.

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 January 03, 2015.

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.



Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 1]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Possible Models for RTCP Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  What Feedback is Achievable With RTCP?  . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Per-packet Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.2.  Per-frame Feedback  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.3.  Per-RTT Feedback  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  Discussion and Conclusions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   8.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8


1.  Introduction

   The coming deployment of WebRTC systems raises the prospect that high
   quality video conferencing will see extremely wide use.  To ensure
   the stability of the network in the face of this use, WebRTC systems
   will need to use some form of congestion control for their RTP-based
   media traffic.  To develop such congestion control, it is necessary
   to understand the sort of congestion feedback that can be provided
   within the framework of RTP [RFC3550] and the RTP Control Protocol
   (RTCP).  It then becomes possible to determine if this is sufficient
   for congestion control, or if some form of RTP extension is needed.

   This memo considers the congestion feedback that can be sent using
   RTCP under the RTP/SAVPF profile [RFC5124] (the secure version of the
   RTP/AVPF profile [RFC4585]).  This profile was chosen as it forms the
   basis for media transport in WebRTC [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-rtp-usage]
   systems.  Nothing in this memo is specific to the secure version of
   the profile, or to WebRTC, however.

2.  Possible Models for RTCP Feedback

   Several questions need to be answered when providing RTCP reception
   quality feedback for congestion control purposes.  These include:

   o  How often is feedback needed?

   o  How much overhead is acceptable?

   o  How much, and what, data does each report contain?

   The key question is how often does the receiver need to send feedback
   on the reception quality it is experiencing, and hence the congestion



Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 2]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


   state of the network?  Traditional congestion control protocols, such
   as TCP, send acknowledgements with every packet (or, at least, every
   couple of packets).  That is straight-forward and low overhead when
   traffic is bidirectional and acknowledgements can be piggybacked onto
   return path data packets.  It can also be acceptable, and can have
   reasonable overhead, to send separate acknowledgement packets when
   those packets are much smaller than data packets.  It becomes a
   problem, however, when there is no return traffic on which to
   piggyback acknowledgements, and when acknowledgements are similar in
   size to data packets; this can be the case for some forms of media
   traffic, especially for voice over IP (VoIP) flows, but less so for
   video.

   When considering multimedia traffic, it might make sense to consider
   less frequent feedback.  For example, it might be possible to send a
   feedback packet once per video frame, or once per network round trip
   time (RTT).  This could still give sufficiently frequent feedback for
   the congestion control loop to be stable and responsive while keeping
   the overhead reasonable when the feedback cannot be piggybacked onto
   returning data.  In this case, it is important to note that RTCP can
   send much more detailed feedback than simple acknowledgements.  For
   example, if it were useful, it could be possible to use an RTCP
   extended report (XR) packet [RFC3611] to send feedback once per RTT
   comprising a bitmap of lost and received packets, with reception
   times, over that RTT.  As long as feedback is sent frequently enough
   that the control loop is stable, and the sender is kept informed when
   data leaves the network (to provide an equivalent to ACK clocking in
   TCP), it is not necessary to report on every packet at the instant it
   is received (indeed, it is unlikely that a video codec can react
   instantly to a rate change anyway, and there is little point in
   providing feedback more often than the codec can adapt).

   The amount of overhead due to congestion control feedback that is
   considered acceptable has to be determined.  RTCP data is sent in
   separate packets to RTP data, and this has some cost in terms of
   additional header overhead compared to protocols that piggyback
   feedback on return path data packets.  The RTP standards have long
   said that a 5% overhead for RTCP traffic generally acceptable, while
   providing the ability to change this fraction.  Is this still the
   case for congestion control feedback?  Or is there a desire to either
   see more responsive feedback and congestion control, possibility with
   a higher overhead, or is lower overhead wanted, accepting that this
   might reduce responsiveness of the congestion control algorithm?

   Finally, the details of how much, and what, data is to be sent in
   each report will affect the frequency and/or overhead of feedback.
   There is a fundamental trade-off that the more frequently feedback
   packets are sent, the less data can be included in each packet to



Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 3]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


   keep the overhead constant.  Does the congestion control need high
   rate but simple feedback (e.g., like TCP acknowledgements), or is it
   acceptable to send more complex feedback less often?

3.  What Feedback is Achievable With RTCP?

3.1.  Per-packet Feedback

   RTCP packets are sent as separate packets to RTP media data, and the
   protocol includes no mechanism for piggybacking an RTCP packet onto
   an RTP data packet.  In addition, the RTCP timing rules are based on
   the size of the RTP session, the number of active senders, the RTCP
   packet size, and the configured RTCP bandwidth fraction, with
   randomisation to prevent synchronisation of reports; accordingly the
   RTCP packet transmission times are extremely unlikely to line up with
   RTP packet transmission times.  As a result, RTCP cannot be used to
   send per-packet feedback in it's current form.

   All of these issues with using RTCP for per-packet feedback could be
   resolved in an update to the RTP protocol, of course.  Such an update
   could change the RTCP timing rules, and might define a shim layer to
   allow multiplexing of RTP and RTCP into a single packet, or to extend
   the RTP header to piggyback feedback data.  This sort of change would
   be a large, and almost certainly backwards incompatible, extension to
   the RTP protocol, and is unlikely to be completed quickly, but could
   be done if there was a need.

3.2.  Per-frame Feedback

   Consider one of the simplest scenarios for WebRTC: a point to point
   video call between two end systems.  There will be four RTP flows in
   this scenario, two audio and two video, with all four flows being
   active for essentially all the time (the audio flows will likely use
   voice activity detection and comfort noise to reduce the packet rate
   during silent periods, and does not cause the transmissions to stop).

   Assume all four flows are sent in a single RTP session, each using a
   separate SSRC.  Further, assume each SSRC sends RTCP reports for all
   other SSRCs in the session (i.e., the optimisations in
   [I-D.ietf-avtcore-rtp-multi-stream-optimisation] are not used, giving
   the worst case for the RTCP overhead).  When all members are senders
   like this, the RTCP timing rules in Sections 6.2 and 6.3 of [RFC3550]
   and [RFC4585] reduce to:

              rtcp_interval = avg_rtcp_size * n / rtcp_bw






Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 4]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


   where n is the number of members in the session, the avg_rtcp_size is
   measured in octets, and the rtcp_bw is the bandwidth available for
   RTCP, measured in octets per second (this will typically be 5% of the
   session bandwidth).

   The average RTCP size will depend on the amount of feedback that is
   sent in each RTCP packet, on the number of members in the session,
   and on the size of source description (RTCP SDES) information sent.
   As a baseline, each RTCP packet will be a compound RTCP packet that
   contains an RTCP SR and an RTCP SDES packet.  In the scenario above,
   each RTCP SR packet will contain three report blocks, once for each
   of the other RTP SSRCs sending data, for a total of 100 octets (this
   is 8 octets header, 20 octets sender info, and 3 * 24 octets report
   blocks).  The RTCP SDES packet will comprise a header (4 octets), an
   originating SSRC (4 octets), a CNAME chunk, and padding.  If the
   CNAME follows [RFC7022] and [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-rtp-usage] it will be 19
   octets in size, and require 1 octet of padding.  The resulting
   compound RTCP packet will be 128 octets in size.  If sent in UDP/IPv4
   with no IP options and using Secure RTP, which adds 20 (IPv4) + 8
   (UDP) + 14 (SRTP with 80 bit Authentication tag), the avg_rtcp_size
   will therefore be 170 octets, including the header overhead.  The
   value n is this scenario is 4, and the rtcp_bw is assumed to be 5% of
   the session bandwidth.

   If it is desired to send RTCP feedback packets on average 30 times
   per second, to correspond to one RTCP report every frame for 30fps
   video, one can invert the above rtcp_interval calculation to get an
   rtcp_bw that gives an interval of 1/30th of a second or lower.  This
   corresponds to an rtcp_bw of 20400 octets per second (since 1/30 =
   170 * 4 / 20400).  This is 163200 bits per second, which if 5% of the
   session bandwidth, gives a session bandwidth of approximately 3.3Mbps
   (i.e., 3.3Mbps media rate, plus an additional 5% for RTCP, to give a
   total data rate of approximately 3.4Mbps).  That is, RTCP can report
   on every frame of video provided the session bandwidth is 3.3Mbps or
   larger, when every SSRC sends a report for every video frame (due to
   randomisation inherent in the RTCP timing rules, the actual RTCP
   transmission intervals will be within the range [0.0135, 0.0406]s,
   but will maintain an average RTCP transmission interval of 0.033s).
   This is not out of line with the expected session bandwidth for this
   type of application, suggesting the RTCP feedback can be used to
   provide per-frame congestion control feedback for WebRTC-style
   applications.

      Note: To achieve the RTCP transmission intervals above the RTP/
      SAVPF profile with T_rr_interval=0 is used, since even when using
      the reduced minimal transmission interval, the RTP/SAVP profile
      would only allow sending RTCP at most every 0.11s (every third
      frame of video).  Using RTP/SAVPF with T_rr_interval=0 however is



Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 5]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


      capable of fully utilizing the configured 5% RTCP bandwidth
      fraction.

   If additional feedback beyond the standard report block is needed,
   the session bandwidth needed will increase slightly.  For example,
   with an additional 20 octets data being reported in each RTCP packet,
   the session bandwidth needed increases to 3.5Mbps for every SSRC to
   be able to report on every frame.

   The above calculations highlight the baseline feasibility of RTCP
   congestion control feedback, but might not be the most appropriate
   usage of the RTCP bandwidth of all applications.  Depending on needs,
   a less frequent usage of regular RTCP compound packets, controlled by
   T_rr_interval combined with using the reduced size RTCP packets, can
   achieve more frequent and useful reporting.  Also the optimisations
   defined in [I-D.ietf-avtcore-rtp-multi-stream-optimisation] will
   reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed for reporting when each
   endpoint has multiple SSRCs.

   It might also seem unnecessary to assign the same fraction of the
   RTCP bandwidth to reporting on the audio and video, since video is
   much higher rate, and so is presumably more likely to cause
   congestion.  Sending audio and video in separate RTCP sessions with
   their own RTCP bandwidth fraction would give essentially double the
   RTCP bandwidth for each video source, since RTCP bandwidth fraction
   would be shared between two reporting SSRCs, rather than between the
   four reporting SSRCs in the single session case.  This would hence
   reduce the session bandwidth needed to allow reports on every frame.
   Extensions to split RTCP bandwidth unequally between participants in
   a single session could be defined to allow this to work with a single
   RTP session on a single UDP port, or two standard RTP sessions could
   be run on a single port, using a demultiplexing shim.  RTCP already
   allows for different bandwidth fractions between senders and
   receivers, so this is a relatively small change to the protocol.

3.3.  Per-RTT Feedback

   The arguments made in Section 3.2 apply to this case as well.  The
   network RTT will usually be larger than the media framing interval,
   so sending feedback per RTT is less of a load on RTCP than sending
   feedback per frame.

4.  Discussion and Conclusions

   RTCP as it is currently specified cannot be used to send per-packet
   congestion feedback.  RTCP can, however, be used to send congestion
   feedback on each frame of video sent, provided the session bandwidth
   exceeds a couple of megabits per second (the exact rate depending on



Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 6]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


   the number of session participants, the RTCP bandwidth fraction, and
   whether audio and video are sent in one or two RTP sessions).  RTCP
   can likely also be used to send feedback on a per-RTT basis, provided
   the RTT is not too low.

   If it is desired to use RTCP in something close to it's current form
   for congestion feedback in WebRTC, the multimedia congestion control
   algorithm needs be designed to work with feedback sent roughly each
   frame or each RTT, rather than per packet, since that fits within the
   limitations of RTCP.  That feedback can be a little more complex than
   just an acknowledgement, provided care is taken to consider the
   impact of the extra feedback on the overhead, possibly allowing for a
   degree of semantic feedback, meaningful to the codec layer as well as
   the congestion control algorithm.

   Further study of the scenarios of interest is needed, to ensure that
   the analysis presented is applicable to other media topologies, and
   to sessions with different data rates and sizes of membership.

5.  Security Considerations

   The security considerations of [RFC3550], [RFC4585], and [RFC5124]
   apply.

6.  IANA Considerations

   There are no actions for IANA.

7.  Acknowledgements

   Thanks to Magnus Westerlund for his feedback on Section 3.2.

8.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-avtcore-rtp-multi-stream-optimisation]
              Lennox, J., Westerlund, M., Wu, W., and C. Perkins,
              "Sending Multiple Media Streams in a Single RTP Session:
              Grouping RTCP Reception Statistics and Other Feedback",
              draft-ietf-avtcore-rtp-multi-stream-optimisation-02 (work
              in progress), February 2014.

   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-rtp-usage]
              Perkins, C., Westerlund, M., and J. Ott, "Web Real-Time
              Communication (WebRTC): Media Transport and Use of RTP",
              draft-ietf-rtcweb-rtp-usage-15 (work in progress), May
              2014.





Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 7]

Internet-Draft    RTCP Feedback for Congestion Control         July 2014


   [RFC3550]  Schulzrinne, H., Casner, S., Frederick, R., and V.
              Jacobson, "RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time
              Applications", STD 64, RFC 3550, July 2003.

   [RFC3611]  Friedman, T., Caceres, R., and A. Clark, "RTP Control
              Protocol Extended Reports (RTCP XR)", RFC 3611, November
              2003.

   [RFC4585]  Ott, J., Wenger, S., Sato, N., Burmeister, C., and J. Rey,
              "Extended RTP Profile for Real-time Transport Control
              Protocol (RTCP)-Based Feedback (RTP/AVPF)", RFC 4585, July
              2006.

   [RFC5124]  Ott, J. and E. Carrara, "Extended Secure RTP Profile for
              Real-time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP)-Based Feedback
              (RTP/SAVPF)", RFC 5124, February 2008.

   [RFC7022]  Begen, A., Perkins, C., Wing, D., and E. Rescorla,
              "Guidelines for Choosing RTP Control Protocol (RTCP)
              Canonical Names (CNAMEs)", RFC 7022, September 2013.

Author's Address

   Colin Perkins
   University of Glasgow
   School of Computing Science
   Glasgow  G12 8QQ
   United Kingdom

   Email: csp@csperkins.org




















Perkins                 Expires January 03, 2015                [Page 8]