This document describes an abstract mechanism by which senders inform the network about the congestion encountered by packets earlier in the same flow. Today, network elements at any layer may signal congestion to the receiver by dropping packets or by ECN markings, and the receiver passes this information back to the sender in transport-layer feedback. The mechanism described here enables the sender to also relay this congestion information back into the network in-band at the IP layer, such that the total amount of congestion from all elements on the path is revealed to all IP elements along the path, where it could, for example, be used to provide input to traffic management. This mechanism is called congestion exposure or ConEx. The companion document "ConEx Concepts and Use Cases" provides the entry-point to the set of ConEx documentation.