]> RAD Data Communications

24 Raoul Wallenberg St., Bldg C Tel Aviv 69719 Israel +972 (0)3 645-5389 yaakov_s@rad.com

EMC Corporation

176 South St. Hopkinton 69719 MA United States +1 (508) 293-7953 david.black@emc.com

BT

ietf@bobbriscoe.net http://bobbriscoe.net/

Internet PALS pseudowire congestion TCP friendliness Pseudowires (PWs) have become a common mechanism for tunneling traffic and may be found in unmanaged scenarios competing for network resources both with other PWs and with non-PW traffic, such as TCP/IP flows. Thus, it is worthwhile specifying under what conditions such competition is acceptable, i.e., the PW traffic does not significantly harm other traffic or contribute more than it should to congestion. We conclude that PWs transporting responsive traffic behave as desired without the need for additional mechanisms. For inelastic PWs (such as Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) PWs), we derive a bound under which such PWs consume no more network capacity than a TCP flow. For TDM PWs, we find that the level of congestion at which the PW can no longer deliver acceptable TDM service is never significantly greater, and is typically much lower, than this bound. Therefore, as long as the PW is shut down when it can no longer deliver acceptable TDM service, it will never do significantly more harm than even a single TCP flow. If the TDM service does not automatically shut down, a mechanism to block persistently unacceptable TDM pseudowires is required.

A pseudowire (PW) (see ) is a construct for tunneling a native service, such as Ethernet or TDM, over a Packet Switched Network (PSN), such as IPv4, IPv6, or MPLS. The PW packet encapsulates a unit of native service information by prepending the headers required for transport in the particular PSN (which must include a demultiplexer field to distinguish the different PWs) and preferably the 4-byte Pseudowire Emulation Edge-to-Edge (PWE3) control word. PWs have no bandwidth reservation or control mechanisms, meaning that when multiple PWs are transported in parallel, and/or in parallel with other flows, there is no defined means for allocating resources for any particular PW, or for preventing the negative impact of a particular PW on neighboring flows. The case where the service provider network provisions a PW with sufficient capacity is well understood and will not be discussed further here. Concerns arise when PWs share network capacity with elastic or congestion-responsive traffic, whether that capacity sharing was planned by a service provider or results from PW deployment by an end user. PWs are most often placed in MPLS tunnels, but we herein restrict ourselves to PWs in IPv4 or IPv6 PSNs; MPLS PSNs are beyond the scope of this document. There are several mechanisms that enable transporting PWs over an IP infrastructure, including: UDP/IP encapsulations as defined for TDM PWs , PWs based on Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TPv3) , MPLS PWs directly over IP according to RFC 4023 , and MPLS PWs over Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) over IP according to RFC 4023 . Whenever PWs are transported over IP, they may compete for network resources with neighboring congestion-responsive flows (e.g., TCP flows). In this document, we study the effect of PWs on such neighboring flows, and discover that the negative impact of PW traffic is generally no worse than that of congestion-responsive flows . At first glance, one may consider a PW transported over IP to be considered as a single flow, on par with a single TCP flow. Were we to accept this tenet, we would require a PW to back off under congestion to consume no more bandwidth than a single TCP flow under such conditions (see ). However, since PWs may carry traffic from many users, it makes more sense to consider each PW to be equivalent to multiple TCP flows. The following two sections consider PWs of two types: concludes that the response to congestion of a PW carrying elastic (e.g., TCP) flows is no different from the aggregated behaviors of the individual elastic flows, had they not been encapsulated within a PW. considers the case of inelastic constant bit rate (CBR) TDM PWs competing with TCP flows. Such PWs require a preset amount of bandwidth, that may be lower or higher than that consumed by an otherwise unconstrained TCP flow under the same network conditions. In any case, such a PW is unable to respond to congestion in a TCP-like manner; although admittedly the total bandwidth it consumes remains constant and does not increase to consume additional bandwidth as TCP rates back off. For TDM services, we will show that TDM service quality degradation generally occurs before the TDM PW becomes TCP-unfriendly. For TDM services that do not automatically shut down when they persistently fail to comply with acceptable TDM service criteria, a transport circuit breaker may be employed as a last resort to shut down a TDM pseudowire that can no longer deliver acceptable service. Thus, in both cases, pseudowires will not inflict significant harm on neighboring TCP flows, as in one case they respond adequately to congestion, and in the other they would be shut down due to being unable to deliver acceptable service before harming neighboring flows. Note: This document contains a large number of graphs that are necessary for its understanding, but could not be rendered in ASCII. It is strongly suggested that the PDF version be consulted.

The following acronyms are used in this document: Alarm Indication Signal (see G.775) Bit Error Rate Bandwidth Constant Bit Rate Errored Second Errored Second Rate Generic Routing Encapsulation Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 Mean Opinion Score Multiprotocol Label Switching Native Service Processing Packet Loss Ratio Packet Switched Network Pseudowire Structure-Agnostic TDM over Packet Severely Errored Seconds Severely Errored Seconds Ratio Transmission Control Protocol Time Division Multiplexing User Datagram Protocol

In this section, we consider Ethernet PWs that primarily carry congestion-responsive traffic. We expand on the remark in Section 8 (Congestion Control) of , and show that the desired congestion avoidance behavior is automatically obtained and additional mechanisms are not needed. Let us assume that an Ethernet PW aggregating several TCP flows is flowing alongside several TCP/IP flows. Each Ethernet PW packet carries a single Ethernet frame that carries a single IP packet that carries a single TCP segment. Thus, if congestion is signaled by an intermediate router dropping a packet, a single end-user TCP/IP packet is dropped, whether or not that packet is encapsulated in the PW. The result is that the individual TCP flows inside the PW experience the same drop probability as the non-PW TCP flows. Thus, the behavior of a TCP sender (retransmitting the packet and appropriately reducing its sending rate) is the same for flows directly over IP and for flows inside the PW. In other words, individual TCP flows are neither rewarded nor penalized for being carried over the PW. An elastic PW does not behave as a single TCP flow, as it will consume the aggregated bandwidth of its component flows; yet if its component TCP flows backs off by some percentage, the bandwidth of the PW as a whole will be reduced by the very same percentage, purely due to the combined effect of its component flows. This is, of course, precisely the desired behavior. Were individual TCP flows rewarded for being carried over a PW, this would create an incentive to create PWs for no operational reason. Were individual flows penalized, there would be a deterrence that could impede pseudowire deployment. There have been proposals to add additional TCP-friendly mechanisms to PWs, for example by carrying PWs over DCCP. In light of the above arguments, it is clear that this would force the PW down to the bandwidth of a single flow, rather than N flows, and penalize the constituent TCP flows. In addition, the individual TCP flows would still back off due to their endpoints being oblivious to the fact that they are carried over a PW. This would further degrade the flow's throughput as compared to a non-PW-encapsulated flow, in contradiction to desirable behavior. We have limited our treatment to the case of TCP traffic carried by Ethernet PWs (which are by far the most commonly deployed packet-carrying pseudowires), but it is not overly difficult to show that our result is equally valid for other PW types, such as ATM or frame-relay pseudowires.

Inelastic PWs, such as TDM PWs , are potentially more problematic than the elastic PWs of the previous section. As mentioned in Section 8 (Congestion Control) of , being constant bit rate (CBR), TDM PWs can't incrementally respond to congestion in a TCP-like fashion. On the other hand, being CBR, TDM PWs do not make things worse by attempting to capture additional bandwidth when neighboring TCP flows back off. Since a TDM PW consumes a constant amount of bandwidth, if the bandwidth occupied by a TDM PW endangers the network as a whole, it might seem that the only recourse is to shut it down, denying service to all customers of the TDM native service. Nonetheless, under certain conditions it may be possible to reduce the bandwidth consumption of an emulated TDM service. A prevalent case is that of a TDM native service that carries voice channels that may not all be active. The ATM Adaptation Layer 2 (AAL2) mode of (perhaps along with connection admission control) can enable bandwidth adaptation, at the expense of more sophisticated native service processing (NSP). In the following, we will focus on structure-agnostic TDM PWs although similar analysis can be readily applied to structure-aware PWs (see ). We will show that, for many cases of interest, a TDM PW, even when treated as a single flow, will behave in a reasonable manner without any additional mechanisms. We also show that, at the level of congestion when a TDM PW can no longer deliver acceptable TDM service, a single unconstrained TCP flow would typically still consume more capacity than a whole TDM PW. Therefore, to ensure that a TDM PW does not inflict significantly more harm than a TCP flow, it suffices to shut down a TDM PW that is persistently unable to deliver acceptable TDM service. This shutting down could be accomplished by employing a managed transport circuit breaker, by which we mean an automatic mechanism for terminating an unresponsive flow during persistently high levels of congestion . Note that a transport circuit breaker is intended as a protection mechanism of last resort, just as an electrical circuit breaker is only triggered when absolutely necessary. For the avoidance of doubt, the above does not say that a TDM PW should be shut down when it becomes TCP-unfriendly. It merely says that the act of shutting down a TDM PW that can no longer deliver acceptable TDM service ensures that the PW does not contribute to congestion significantly more than a TCP flow would. Also, note that being unable to deliver acceptable TDM service for a short amount of time is insufficient justification for shutting down a TDM PW. While TCP flows react within a round-trip time, service commissioning and decommissioning are generally time-consuming processes that should only be undertaken when it becomes clear that the congestion is not transient. In order to quantitatively compare TDM PWs to TCP flows, we will compare the effect of TDM PW traffic with that of TCP traffic having the same packet size and delay. This is potentially an overly pessimistic comparison, as TDM PW packets are frequently configured to be short in order to minimize latency, while TCP packets are free to be much larger. There are two network parameters relevant to our discussion, namely the one-way delay (D) and the packet loss ratio (PLR). The one-way delay of a native TDM service consists of the physical time-of-flight plus 125 microseconds for each TDM switch traversed, and is thus very small as compared to typical PSN network-crossing latencies. Since TDM services are designed with this low latency in mind, emulated TDM services are usually required to have similar low end-to-end delay. In our comparisons, we will only consider one-way delays of a few milliseconds. Regarding packet loss, the relevant RFCs specify actions to be carried out upon detecting a lost packet. Structure-agnostic transport has no alternative to outputting an "all-ones" Alarm Indication Signal (AIS) pattern towards the TDM circuit, which, when long enough in duration, is recognized by the receiving TDM device as a fault indication (see ). TDM standards (such as ) place stringent limits on the number of such faults tolerated. Calculations presented in show that only loss probabilities in the realm of fractions of a percent are relevant for structure-agnostic transport. Structure-aware transport regenerates frame alignment signals, thus avoiding AIS indications resulting from infrequent packet loss. Furthermore, for TDM circuits carrying voice channels, the use of packet loss concealment algorithms is possible (such algorithms have been previously described for TDM PWs). However, even structure-aware transport ceases to provide a useful service at about 2 percent loss probability. Hence, in our comparisons we will only consider PLRs of 1 or 2 percent. TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) provides a simplified formula for TCP throughput as a function of round-trip delay and packet loss ratio.

where: X is the average sending rate in bytes per second, S is the segment (packet payload) size in bytes, R is the round-trip time in seconds, p is the packet loss probability (i.e., PLR/100). We can now compare the bandwidth consumed by TDM pseudowires with that of a TCP flow for a given packet loss ratio and one-way end-to-end delay (taken to be half the round-trip delay R). The results are depicted in the accompanying figures (available only in the PDF version of this document). In Figures 1 and 2, we see the conventional rate vs. packet loss plot for low-rate TDM (both T1 and E1) traffic, as well as TCP traffic with the same payload size (64 or 256 bytes respectively). Since the TDM rates are constant (T1 and E1 having payload throughputs of 1.544 Mbps and 2.048 Mbps respectively), and Structure-Agnostic TDM over packet (SAToP) can only faithfully emulate a TDM service up to a PLR of about half a percent, the T1 and E1 pseudowires occupy line segments on the graph. On the other hand, the TCP rate equation produces rate curves dependent on both one-way delay and packet loss. For large packet sizes, short one-way delays, and low packet loss ratios, the TDM pseudowires typically consume much less bandwidth than TCP would under identical conditions. For small packets, long one-way delays, and high packet loss ratios, TDM PWs potentially consume more bandwidth, but only marginally. Furthermore, our "apples to apples" comparison forced the TCP traffic to use packets of sizes smaller than would be typical. Similarly, in Figures 3 and 4 we repeat the exercise for higher rate E3 and T3 (rates 34.368 and 44.736 Mbps respectively) pseudowires, allowing delays and PLRs suitable for these signals. We see that the TDM pseudowires consume much less bandwidth than TCP, for all reasonable parameter combinations.

We can use the TCP rate equation to determine the precise conditions under which a TDM PW consumes no more bandwidth than a TCP flow between the same endpoints under identical conditions. Replacing the round-trip delay with twice the one-way delay D, setting the bandwidth to that of the TDM service BW, and the segment size to be the TDM fragment (taking into account the PWE3 control word), we obtain the following condition for a TDM PW:

where: D is the one-way delay, S is the TDM segment size (packet excluding overhead) in bytes, BW is the TDM service bandwidth in bits per second, f(p) = sqrt(2p/3) + 12 sqrt(3p/8) p (1+32p^2). One may view this condition as defining a "friendly" operating envelope for a TDM PW, as a TDM PW that occupies no more bandwidth than a TCP flow causes no more congestion than that TCP flow. Under this condition, it is acceptable to place the TDM PW alongside congestion-responsive traffic such as TCP. On the other hand, were the TDM PW to consume significantly more bandwidth than a TCP flow, it could contribute disproportionately to congestion, and its mixture with congestion-responsive traffic might be inappropriate. Note that we are sidestepping any debate over the validity of the TCP-friendliness concept and merely saying that there can be no question that a TDM PW is acceptable if it causes no more congestion than a single TCP flow. We derived this condition assuming steady-state conditions, and thus two caveats are in order. First, the condition does not specify how to treat a TDM PW that initially satisfies the condition, but is then faced with a deteriorating network environment. In such cases, one additionally needs to analyze the reaction times of the responsive flows to congestion events. Second, the derivation assumed that the TDM PW was competing with long-lived TCP flows, because under this assumption it was straightforward to obtain a quantitative comparison with something widely considered to offer a safe response to congestion. Short-lived TCP flows may find themselves disadvantaged as compared to a long-lived TDM PW satisfying the above condition. We see in Figures 5 and 6 that TDM pseudowires carrying T1 or E1 native services satisfy the condition for all parameters of interest for large packet sizes (e.g., S=512 bytes of TDM data). For the SAToP default of 256 bytes, as long as the one-way delay is less than 10 milliseconds, the loss probability can exceed 0.3 or 0.6 percent. For packets containing 128 or 64 bytes, the constraints are more troublesome, but there are still parameter ranges where the TDM PW consumes less than a TCP flow under similar conditions. Similarly, Figures 7 and 8 demonstrate that E3 and T3 native services with the SAToP default of 1024 bytes of TDM per packet satisfy the condition for a broad spectrum of delays and PLRs.

The figures presented in the previous section demonstrate that TDM service quality degradation generally occurs before the TDM PW would consume more bandwidth than a comparable TCP flow. Thus, while TDM PWs are unable to respond to congestion in a TCP-like fashion, TDM PWs that are able to deliver acceptable TDM service do not contribute to congestion significantly more than a TCP flow. Combined with our earlier determination that Ethernet PWs automatically respond in a TCP-like fashion (see ), our final conclusion is that PW-specific congestion-avoidance mechanisms are generally not required. This is true even for TDM PWs, assuming that the TDM management plane initiates service shutdown when service parameters are persistently below levels required by the relevant TDM standards. If the TDM service does not automatically shut down, a mechanism to block persistently unacceptable TDM pseudowires is required, or a transport circuit breaker may be triggered as a last resort.

This document does not introduce any new congestion-specific mechanisms and thus does not introduce any new security considerations above those present for PWs in general.

&RFC3031; &RFC2784; &RFC3931; &RFC2914; &RFC3985; &RFC4023; &RFC4553; &RFC5033; &RFC5086; &RFC5087; &RFC5348; ITU-T ITU-T ITU-T ITU-T ITU-T ITU-T

ITU-T Recommendation G.826 specifies limits on the Errored Second Ratio (ESR) and the Severely Errored Second Ratio (SESR). For our purposes, we will simplify the definitions and understand an Errored Second (ES) to be a second of time during which a TDM bit error occurred or a defect indication was detected. A Severely Errored Second (SES) is an ES second during which the Bit Error Rate (BER) exceeded one in one thousand (10^-3). Note that if the error condition AIS was detected according to the criteria of ITU-T Recommendation G.775 , an SES was considered to have occurred. The respective ratios are the fraction of ES or SES to the total number of seconds in the measurement interval. All TDM signals run at 8000 frames per second (higher rate TDM signals have longer frames). So, assuming an integer number of TDM frames per TDM PW packet, the number of packets per second is given by packets per second = 8000 / (frames per packet). Prevalent cases are 1, 2, 4, and 8 frames per packet, translating to 8000, 4000, 2000, and 1000 packets per second, respectively. For both E1 and T1 TDM circuits, G.826 allows an ESR of 4% (0.04), and an SESR of 0.2% (0.002). For E3 and T3, the ESR must be no more than 7.5% (0.075), while the SESR is unchanged. Focusing on E1 circuits, the ESR of 4% translates (assuming the worst case of isolated exactly periodic packet loss) to a packet loss event no more than every 25 seconds. However, once a packet is lost, another packet lost in the same second doesn't change the ESR, although it may contribute to the ES becoming an SES. Thus for 1, 2, 4, and 8 frames per packet, the maximum allowed packet loss probability is 0.0005%, 0.001%, 0.002%, and 0.004% respectively. These extremely low allowed packet loss probabilities are only for the worst case scenario. With tail-drop buffers, when packet loss is above 0.001%, it is likely that loss bursts will occur. If the lost packets are sufficiently close together (we ignore the precise details here), then the permitted packet loss ratio increases by the appropriate factor, without G.826 being cognizant of any change. Hence, the worst-case analysis is expected to be extremely pessimistic for real networks. Next, we will consider the opposite extreme and assume that all packet loss events are in periodic loss bursts. In order to minimize the ESR, we will assume that the burst lasts no more than one second, and so we can afford to lose in each burst no more than the number of packets transmitted in one second. As long as such one-second bursts do not exceed four percent of the time, we still maintain the allowable ESR. Hence, the maximum permissible packet loss ratio is 4%. Of course, this estimate is extremely optimistic, and furthermore does not take into consideration the SESR criteria. As previously explained, an SES is declared whenever AIS is detected. There is a major difference between structure-aware and structure-agnostic transport in this regards. When a packet is lost, SAToP outputs an "all-ones" pattern to the TDM circuit, which is interpreted as AIS according to G.775 . For E1 circuits, G.775 specifies that AIS is detected when four consecutive TDM frames have no more than 2 alternations. This means that if a PW packet or consecutive packets containing at least four frames are lost, and four or more frames of "all-ones" output to the TDM circuit, an SES will be declared. Thus burst packet loss, or packets containing a large number of TDM frames, lead SAToP to cause high SESR, which is 20 times more restricted than ESR. On the other hand, since structure-aware transport regenerates the correct frame alignment pattern, even when the corresponding packet has been lost, packet loss will not cause declaration of SES. This is the main reason that SAToP is much more vulnerable to packet loss than the structure-aware methods. For realistic networks, the maximum allowed packet loss for SAToP will be intermediate between the extremely pessimistic estimates and the extremely optimistic ones. In order to numerically gauge the situation, we have modeled the network as a four-state Markov model, (corresponding to a successfully received packet, a packet received within a loss burst, a packet lost within a burst, and a packet lost when not within a burst). This model is an extension of the widely used Gilbert model. We set the transition probabilities in order to roughly correspond to anecdotal evidence, namely low background isolated packet loss, and infrequent bursts wherein most packets are lost. Such simulation shows that up to 0.5% average packet loss may occur and the recovered TDM still conforms to the G.826 ESR and SESR criteria.

Packet loss in voice traffic causes audio artifacts such as choppy, annoying, or even unintelligible speech. The precise effect of packet loss on voice quality has been the subject of detailed study in the Voice over IP (VoIP) community, but VoIP results are not directly applicable to TDM PWs. This is because VoIP packets typically contain over 10 milliseconds of the speech signal, while multichannel TDM packets may contain only a single sample, or perhaps a very small number of samples. The effect of packet loss on TDM PWs has been previously reported . In that study, it was assumed that each packet carried a single sample of each TDM timeslot (although the extension to multiple samples is relatively straightforward and does not drastically change the results). Four sample replacement algorithms were compared, differing in the value used to replace the lost sample: Replacing every lost sample by a preselected constant (e.g., zero or "AIS" insertion). Replacing a lost sample by the previous sample. Replacing a lost sample by linear interpolation between the previous and following samples. Replacing the lost sample by STatistically Enhanced INterpolation (STEIN). Only the first method is applicable to SAToP transport, as structure awareness is required in order to identify the individual voice channels. For structure-aware transport, the loss of a packet is typically identified by the receipt of the following packet, and thus the following sample is usually available. The last algorithm posits the Linear-Predictive Coding (LPC) speech generation model and derives lost samples based on available samples both before and after each lost sample. The four algorithms were compared in a controlled experiment in which speech data was selected from English and American English subsets of the ITU-T P.50 Appendix 1 corpus and consisted of 16 speakers, eight male and eight female. Each speaker spoke either three or four sentences, for a total of between seven and 15 seconds. The selected files were filtered to telephony quality using modified IRS filtering and down-sampled to 8 kHz. Packet loss of 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 percent were simulated using a uniform random number generator (bursty packet loss was also simulated but is not reported here). For each file, the four methods of lost sample replacement were applied and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) was estimated using PESQ . Figure 9 depicts the PESQ-derived MOS for each of the four replacement methods for packet drop probabilities up to 5%.

For all cases, the MOS resulting from the use of zero insertion is less than that obtained by replacing with the previous sample, which in turn is less than that of linear interpolation, which is slightly less than that obtained by statistical interpolation. Unlike the artifacts that speech compression methods may produce when subject to buffer loss, packet loss here effectively produces additive white impulse noise. The subjective impression is that of static noise on AM radio stations or crackling on old phonograph records. For a given PESQ-derived MOS, this type of degradation is more acceptable to listeners than choppiness or tones common in VoIP. If MOS>4 (full toll quality) is required, then the following packet drop probabilities are allowable: zero insertion - 0.05% previous sample - 0.25% linear interpolation - 0.75% STEIN - 2% If MOS>3.75 (barely perceptible quality degradation) is acceptable, then the following packet drop probabilities are allowable: zero insertion - 0.1% previous sample - 0.75% linear interpolation - 3% STEIN - 6.5% If MOS>3.5 (cell phone quality) is tolerable, then the following packet drop probabilities are allowable: zero insertion - 0.4% previous sample - 2% linear interpolation - 8% STEIN - 14%