Internet DRAFT - draft-xiang-alto-multidomain-extension

draft-xiang-alto-multidomain-extension







ALTO WG                                                         Q. Xiang
Internet-Draft                                                   Y. Yang
Intended status: Standards Track                         Yale University
Expires: 5 May 2021                                      1 November 2020


ALTO Multi-Domain Extension: Challenges, Existing Efforts and Next Steps
             draft-xiang-alto-multidomain-extension-00.txt

Abstract

   The emerging multi-domain applications, such as flexible interdomain
   routing, distributed, federated machine learning and multi-domain
   collaborative dataset transfer, can benefit substantially from
   getting information from networks.  The ALTO base protocol [RFC7285]
   provides a northbound interface for applications to retrieve the
   network information.  In particular, it specifies the communication
   between an ALTO client and an ALTO server, where the ALTO is
   implicitly assumed to be able to answer any query from the ALTO
   client.  However, it does not specify the cases when the network
   information are originated from multiple domains (i.e.,
   administrative entities or geographically partitions).  This document
   summarizes the discussion on the ALTO weekly meeting since IETF 108
   on how to extend ALTO to support multi-domain applications.  It
   identifies the key challenges for retrieving network information from
   multiple networks, reviews the existing efforts in the work group,
   and discusses the next steps to fully address the challenges.

Status of This Memo

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

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on 5 May 2021.







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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2020 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
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   Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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   provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Extending ALTO to Multi-Domain: Challenges  . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Existing Efforts in the ALTO Working Group  . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  ALTO Multi-Domain Extension: Basic Ideas  . . . . . . . . . .   4
   6.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     6.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     6.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6

1.  Introduction

   The ALTO protocol [RFC7285] provides network information to
   applications so that applications can make network informed decisions
   to improve the performance.  Not only traditional applications such
   peer-to-peer systems, many recent, novel multi-domain applications,
   which orchestrate resources across multiple networks, can also
   benefit substantially from ALTO.

   Since the recharter discussion on IETF 108, there has been much
   interest and discussion on the ALTO weekly meetings to extend the
   ALTO base protocol to support multi-domain applications.  This
   document is a summary of the discussion on these meetings.  It
   outlines the challenges, reviews the existing efforts in the working
   group, and discuss the next steps to design ALTO multi-domain
   extensions.

2.  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 [RFC2119].



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3.  Extending ALTO to Multi-Domain: Challenges

   This section uses a motivating example to outline the key challenges
   for designing ALTO extensions to support multi-domain applications.

   Consider the example in Figure 1, where the application wants to
   retrieve the network information from endpoint S to endpoint D.  S
   and D are each attached to a different network.

   *  Challenge 1: the route from S to D spans multiple networks, whose
      information is partitioned and stored at multiple ALTO servers.
      In other words, no single ALTO server has the complete information
      of the flow from S to D.  As such, either the ALTO client needs to
      communicate with all ALTO servers along the route to collect and
      aggregate all the information, or the ALTO server that receives
      the ALTO client's query at the beginning needs to acts as a
      delegate to collect and aggregate all the information before
      returning it to the ALTO client.

   *  Challenge 2: the route from S to D may not even be fully
      instantiated.  For example, when a network uses SDN to manage its
      routing and performs load balancing based on the the remainder of
      flows' source MAC addresses divided by 3, it is impossible to
      fully instantiate the forwarding table on the limited memory in a
      commodity OpenFlow switch.  As such, the ALTO client or the
      delegated ALTO server needs to decide which other ALTO servers to
      contact to collect the needed information.

   *  Challenge 3: Different ALTO servers may have information about
      different metrics.  In particular, along the route from S to D,
      two ALTO servers may provide information two segments of the route
      with different metrics, e.g., one provides the bandwidth
      information while the other provides the latency information.
      Even if two ALTO servers provide information of the same metric,
      say latency, they may provide different statistics, e.g., one
      provide the mean latency while the other provide the median
      latency.  As such, the ALTO client or the delegated ALTO server
      needs to figure out how to aggregate such information and return
      to the application.

   *  Challenge 4: When the application wants to retrieve network
      information of multiple pairs of source-destination endpoints, the
      routes of different flows may share same link(s), leading to
      resource sharing.  As such, collecting network information of
      different flows individually may yield inaccurate results.






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4.  Existing Efforts in the ALTO Working Group

   Several documents in the ALTO group have made design proposals for
   extending ALTO to multi-domain settings.  This section provides a
   review.

   *  [DRAFT-UNICORN-INFO] and [DRAFT-NFCHAIN] propose broker-based
      architectures for collection network information from multiple
      networks.  In particular, an ALTO client act as a broker or
      aggregator on behalf of applications to directly communicate with
      all ALTO servers in the networks to collect and aggregate
      information.  These efforts provide initial starting point for
      addressing challenge 1, but does not specify how different ALTO
      servers can communicate with each other.

   *  For challenge 2, [RFC8686] specifies a cross-domain ALTO server
      discovery mechanism for the ALTO client or the delegate ALTO
      server to discover which ALTO server possesses the information of
      interest.  It partially address challenge 2.  However, it does not
      specify how to handle the scenario where different ALTO servers
      possess different parts of the information of interest (i.e.,
      partial information).

   *  [DRAFT-UNICORN-INFO] provides an information aggregation mechanism
      to aggregate information from multiple networks.  It is related to
      challenge 3, however, it assumes that all networks provide
      information using the same metric and the same statistics.

   *  [DRAFT-PV] designs the ALTO path vector extension to support ALTO
      servers to capture the resource sharing among multiple flows and
      return to the ALTO client.  However, it does not specify the
      scenario where network uses more complex routing strategies, such
      as multipath routing and on-demand routing, for source-destination
      endpoints.

5.  ALTO Multi-Domain Extension: Basic Ideas

   This section describes the basic ideas to design an ALTO multi-domain
   extension to address the aforementioned challenges.  In particular,
   to address challenge 1 and 2 to identify the full route of a source-
   destination endpoint pair and query the corresponding ALTO servers to
   retrieve information, we will base on the pub-sub design of the SDN
   federation routing protocol [SFP] and go beyond to specify the inter-
   ALTO-server communication mechanism, which allows ALTO servers to
   exchange and aggregate information from multiple networks.






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   To address challenge 3 to aggregate the information from different
   networks, we will extend the ALTO framework to standardize single
   aggregation in some settings, where information are in the same
   metric and uses the same statistics.  To aggregate the information
   from different networks in different metrics and statics, we will
   resort to the theoretical framework of routing algebra [ROUTING-MO],
   which aggregates routing information of different metrics as a
   partial order of vectors, and go beyond to specify the multi-domain
   ALTO server information aggregation mechanism, which supports the
   more flexible aggregation of ALTO information.

   To address challenge 4 to retrieve the resource sharing information
   of multiple source-destination endpoints pairs when networks use more
   complex routing strategies such as multipath routing and on-demand
   routing, we will base on the ALTO path vector extension [DRAFT-PV],
   but go beyond to use generic mathematical programming constraints as
   a compact representation of the resource sharing information across
   multiple networks.

6.  References

6.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

6.2.  Informative References

   [DRAFT-NFCHAIN]
              Perez, D. and C. Rothenberg, "ALTO-based Broker-assisted
              Multi-domain Orchestration", 2018,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-
              lachosrothenberg-alto-brokermdo-01>.

   [DRAFT-PV] Bernstein, G., Lee, Y., Roome, W., Scharf, M., and Y. R.
              Yang, "ALTO Extension: Abstract Path Vector as a Cost
              Mode", 2015, <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yang-alto-
              path-vector-01>.

   [DRAFT-UNICORN-INFO]
              Xiang, Q., Newman, H., Bernstein, G., Du, H., Gao, K.,
              Mughal, A., Balcas, J., Zhang, J., and Y. R. Yang,
              "Implementation and Deployment of A Resource Orchestration
              System for Multi-Domain Data Analytics", 2017,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-xiang-alto-
              exascale-network-optimization/>.



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   [RFC7285]  Alimi, R., Ed., Penno, R., Ed., Yang, Y., Ed., Kiesel, S.,
              Previdi, S., Roome, W., Shalunov, S., and R. Woundy,
              "Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) Protocol",
              RFC 7285, DOI 10.17487/RFC7285, September 2014,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7285>.

   [RFC8189]  Randriamasy, S., Roome, W., and N. Schwan, "Multi-Cost
              Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO)", RFC 8189,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8189, October 2017,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8189>.

   [RFC8686]  Kiesel, S. and M. Stiemerling, "Application-Layer Traffic
              Optimization (ALTO) Cross-Domain Server Discovery",
              RFC 8686, DOI 10.17487/RFC8686, February 2020,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8686>.

   [ROUTING-MO]
              Sobrinho, J. and M. Ferreira, "Routing on Multiple
              Optimality Criteria", 2020,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2020>.

   [SFP]      Xiang, Q., Guok, C., Le, F., MacAuley, J., Newman, H., and
              Y. R. Yang, "SFP: Toward Interdomain Routing for SDN
              Networks", 2018,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2018>.

Authors' Addresses

   Qiao Xiang
   Yale University
   51 Prospect Street
   New Haven, CT
   United States of America

   Email: qiao.xiang@cs.yale.edu


   Y. Richard Yang
   Yale University
   51 Prospect Street
   New Haven, CT
   United States of America

   Email: yry@cs.yale.edu







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