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Using Entropy Label for Network Slice Identification in MPLS networks.
draft-decraene-mpls-slid-encoded-entropy-label-id-04

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Expired".
Authors Bruno Decraene , Clarence Filsfils , Wim Henderickx , Tarek Saad , Vishnu Pavan Beeram , Luay Jalil
Last updated 2022-06-14 (Latest revision 2022-02-11)
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draft-decraene-mpls-slid-encoded-entropy-label-id-04
MPLS                                                    B. Decraene, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                                    Orange
Updates: 6790 (if approved)                                  C. Filsfils
Intended status: Standards Track                     Cisco Systems, Inc.
Expires: 16 December 2022                                  W. Henderickx
                                                                   Nokia
                                                                 T. Saad
                                                               V. Beeram
                                                        Juniper Networks
                                                                L. Jalil
                                                                 Verizon
                                                            14 June 2022

 Using Entropy Label for Network Slice Identification in MPLS networks.
          draft-decraene-mpls-slid-encoded-entropy-label-id-04

Abstract

   This document updates [RFC6790] to extend the use of the TTL field of
   the Entropy Label in order to provide a flexible set of flags called
   the Entropy Label Control field.

   This document also defines a solution to encode a slice identifier in
   MPLS in order to distinguish packets that belong to different slices,
   to allow enforcing per network slice policies (.e.g, Qos).

   The slice identification is independent of the topology.  It allows
   for QoS/DiffServ policy on a per slice basis in addition to the per
   packet QoS/DiffServ policy provided by the MPLS Traffic Class field.

   In order to minimize the size of the MPLS stack and to ease
   incremental deployment the slice identifier is encoded as part of the
   Entropy Label.

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 https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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   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 16 December 2022.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2022 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 (https://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 Revised BSD License text as
   described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
   provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Entropy Label Control field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Slice Identifier  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     4.1.  Ingress LSR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     4.2.  Transit LSR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.3.  Bandwidth-Allocation Slice  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.4.  Backward Compatibility  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.5.  Benefits  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   5.  Examples of more ELC usages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     5.1.  End to end absolute loss measurements . . . . . . . . . .   6
     5.2.  Programmed sampling of packets  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   6.  Deployment Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  Implementation Status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   8.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   9.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   10. Changes / Authors Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   11. Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   12. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     12.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     12.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9

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1.  Introduction

   This document defines a solution to encode a slice identifier in MPLS
   in order to provide QoS on a per slice basis.  It allows for QoS/
   DiffServ policy on a per slice basis in addition to the per packet
   QoS/DiffServ policy provided by the MPLS Traffic Class field.  The
   slice identification is independent of the topology and the QoS of
   the network, thus enabling scalable network slicing.

   This document encodes the slice identifier in a portion of the MPLS
   Entropy Label (EL) defined in [RFC6790] . This has advantages as it
   avoids the use of additional label which would increase the size of
   the label stack.  This also reuses the data plane processing of the
   Entropy Label on the egress LSR, the signaling of the Entropy Label
   capability from the egress to the ingress [RFC9088] [RFC9089] , and
   the signaling capability of transit routers to read this label
   [RFC8491] which allows for an easier and faster incremental
   deployment.

2.  Requirements Language

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
   14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

3.  Entropy Label Control field

   [RFC6790] defines the MPLS Entropy Label.  [RFC6790] section 4.2
   defines the use of the Entropy Label Indicator (ELI) followed by the
   Entropy Label (EL) and the MPLS header fields (Label, TC, S, TTL) in
   each.  [RFC6790] also specifies that the TTL field of the EL must be
   set to zero by the ingress LSR.

   Following the procedures of [RFC6790] EL is never used for forwarding
   and its TTL is never looked at nor decremented:

   *  An EL capable Egress LSR performs a lookup on the ELI and as a
      result pop two labels: ELI and EL.

   *  An EL non-capable Egress LSR performs a lookup on the ELI and as a
      result must drop the packet as specified in [RFC3031] for the
      handling of an invalid incoming label.

   Hence essentially the TTL field of the EL behaves as a reserved field
   which must be set to zero when sent and ignored when received.

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   This documents extends the TTL field of the EL and calls it the
   Entropy Label Control (ELC) field.  The ELC is a set of eight flags:
   ELC0 for bit 0, ELC1 for bit 1,..., ELC7 for bit 7.

   Given that the MPLS header is very compact (32 bits) with no reserved
   bits and that MPLS is used within a trusted administrative domain,
   the semantic of these bits is not standardized but defined on a per
   administrative domain basis.  This allows for increased re-use and
   flexibility of this scarce resource.  As a consequence, an
   application using one of those buts MUST allow the choice of the bit
   by configuration by the network operator.

4.  Slice Identifier

   Each network slice in an MPLS domain is uniquely identified by a
   Slice Identifier (SLID) [I-D.bestbar-teas-ns-packet] . This section
   encodes the SLID in a portion of the MPLS Entropy Label defined in
   [RFC6790] .

   The number of bits to be used for encoding the SLID in the EL is
   governed by a local policy and uniform within a network slice policy
   domain.

4.1.  Ingress LSR

   When an ingress LSR classifies that a packet belongs to the slice and
   that the egress has indicated via signaling that it can process EL
   for the tunnel, the ingress LSR pushes an Entropy Label with the:

   *  SLID encoded in the most significant bits of the Entropy Label.

   *  the entropy information encoded in the remaining lower bits of the
      Entropy Label as described in section 4.2 of [RFC6790].

   *  SPI bit (SLID Presence Indicator) set in one bit of the ELC field.

   The choice of the ELC field used for SPI, and the number of bits to
   be used for encoding the SLID MUST be configurable by the network
   operator.

   The slice classification method is outside the scope of this
   document.

   The encoding of the Slide ID in the Entropy Label is in line with the
   specification of the Flow Label as the slide identification _is_ a
   property of the flow:

   *  For a given flow it is constant in all packets.

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   *  It's a property specific to the flow so would typically be used to
      determine the Entropy Label.

4.2.  Transit LSR

   Any LSR that forwards a packet with the SPI bit set MUST use the SLID
   to select a slice and apply per-slice policies.

   There are many different policies that could define a slice for a
   particular application or service.  The most basic of these is
   bandwidth-allocation, an implementation complying with this
   specification SHOULD support the bandwidth-allocation slice as
   defined in the next section.

4.3.  Bandwidth-Allocation Slice

   A per-slice policy is configured at each interface of each router in
   the domain, with one traffic shaper per SLID.  The bit rate of each
   shaper is configured to reflect the bandwidth allocation of the per-
   slice policy.

   If shapers are not available, or desirable, an implementation MAY
   configure one scheduling queue per SLID with a guaranteed bandwidth
   equal to the bandwidth-allocation for the slice.  This option allows
   a slice to consume more bandwidth than its allocation when available.

   Per-slice shapers or queues effectively provides a virtual port per
   slice.  This solution MAY be complemented with a per-virtual-port
   hierarchical DiffServ policy.  Within the context of one specific
   slice, packets are further classified into children DiffServ queues
   which hang from the virtual port.  The Traffic Class value in the
   MPLS header SHOULD be used for queue selection.

4.4.  Backward Compatibility

   The Entropy Label usage described in this document is consistent with
   [RFC6790] as ingress LSRs freely chooses the EL of a given flow, and
   transit LSRs treat the EL as an opaque set of bits.

   As per [RFC6790] an ingress LSR that does not support this extension
   has the SPI bit cleared, and thus does not enable the SLID semantic
   of the Entropy bits.  Hence, SLID-aware transit LSRs will not
   classify these packets into a slice.

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4.5.  Benefits

   From a Segment Routing architecture perspective, this network slice
   identifier for SR-MPLS is inline with the network slice identifier
   for SRv6 proposed in [I-D.filsfils-spring-srv6-stateless-slice-id] .

   From an SR-MPLS perspective, using the EL to carry the network slice
   identifier has multiple benefits:

   *  This limits the number of labels pushed on the MPLS stack compared
      to using a pair of labels (ELI+EL) for flow entropy plus two or
      three labels for the slice indicator and the slice identifier.
      This is beneficial for the ingress LSR which may have limitations
      with regards to the number of labels pushed, for the transit LSR
      which may have limitations with regards to the label stack depth
      to be examined during transit in order to read both the entropy
      and the SLID.  This presents additional benefit to network
      operators by reducing the packet overhead for traffic carried
      through the network;

   *  This avoids defining new extensions for the signaling of the
      egress capability to support the slice indicator and the slice
      identifier;

   *  This improves incremental deployment as all egress LSRs supporting
      EL can be sent the slice identifier from day one, allowing slice
      classification on transit LSRs.

5.  Examples of more ELC usages

5.1.  End to end absolute loss measurements

   This section describes the usage of a ELC flag to enable packet loss
   measurements, as described in section 3.1 of [RFC8321].

   TBD

5.2.  Programmed sampling of packets

   This section describes the usage of a ELC flag to detect end to end
   packet loss.

   TBD

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6.  Deployment Considerations

   The number of bits to be used for encoding the SLID in the EL affects
   the number of effective entropy bits.  The total number of raw bits
   available for encoding entropy is not changed as the slice ID is part
   of the flow identification and contains some entropy.  However this
   is expected to reduce the effective number of entropy bit as the
   slice ID is likely to less effectively encode entropy information
   compared to the use of a good hash function.  The effective reduction
   of entropy depends on how good the [RFC6790] entropy value is
   computed (which is implementation dependent) and the statistical
   distribution of the usage of slice identifier.  In order to minimize
   this reduction, network operators should set the size of the field
   encoding the slice identifier to the minimum size required for the
   number of slides used in deployment.

7.  Implementation Status

   The following hardware platforms support "end-to-end" network
   slicing/ partitioning as described in Section 4:

   *  Cisco NCS platforms based on Broadcom Jericho2 family of ASIC.
      The support includes the ingress as well as the transit LSRs
      roles.

8.  Security Considerations

   The MPLS forwarding plane is insecure.  If an adversary can affect
   the forwarding plane, then they can inject data, remove data, corrupt
   data, or modify data.

   This documents additionnally allows an adversary to change the slice
   of a packet, and to add or remove indicators/flags.

   Link-level security mechanisms can help mitigate some on-link
   attacks, but does nothing to preclude hostile nodes.

9.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.

10.  Changes / Authors Notes

   [RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication]

   00: Initial version.

   01: New co-author

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   02: Editorial precision that the slice ID is a component of flow
   entropy hence inline with the use of entropy label.

   03: Refresh.

   04: New sections: Implementation Status, Security Considerations,
   Deployment Considerations, Requirements Language, IANA
   Considerations.  Editorial: replace "SR-MPLS" by "MPLS".

11.  Acknowledgements

   Authors would like to thanks Zafar Ali for his contributions.

12.  References

12.1.  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>.

   [RFC6790]  Kompella, K., Drake, J., Amante, S., Henderickx, W., and
              L. Yong, "The Use of Entropy Labels in MPLS Forwarding",
              RFC 6790, DOI 10.17487/RFC6790, November 2012,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6790>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

   [RFC9088]  Xu, X., Kini, S., Psenak, P., Filsfils, C., Litkowski, S.,
              and M. Bocci, "Signaling Entropy Label Capability and
              Entropy Readable Label Depth Using IS-IS", RFC 9088,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC9088, August 2021,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9088>.

   [RFC9089]  Xu, X., Kini, S., Psenak, P., Filsfils, C., Litkowski, S.,
              and M. Bocci, "Signaling Entropy Label Capability and
              Entropy Readable Label Depth Using OSPF", RFC 9089,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC9089, August 2021,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9089>.

12.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.bestbar-teas-ns-packet]
              Saad, T., Beeram, V. P., Dong, J., Wen, B., Ceccarelli,
              D., Halpern, J., Peng, S., Chen, R., Liu, X., Contreras,

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              L. M., Rokui, R., and L. Jalil, "Realizing Network Slices
              in IP/MPLS Networks", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft,
              draft-bestbar-teas-ns-packet-10, 5 May 2022,
              <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bestbar-teas-ns-
              packet-10.txt>.

   [I-D.filsfils-spring-srv6-stateless-slice-id]
              Filsfils, C., Clad, F., Camarillo, P., Raza, K., Voyer,
              D., and R. Rokui, "Stateless and Scalable Network Slice
              Identification for SRv6", Work in Progress, Internet-
              Draft, draft-filsfils-spring-srv6-stateless-slice-id-05,
              30 January 2022, <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-
              filsfils-spring-srv6-stateless-slice-id-05.txt>.

   [RFC3031]  Rosen, E., Viswanathan, A., and R. Callon, "Multiprotocol
              Label Switching Architecture", RFC 3031,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC3031, January 2001,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3031>.

   [RFC8321]  Fioccola, G., Ed., Capello, A., Cociglio, M., Castaldelli,
              L., Chen, M., Zheng, L., Mirsky, G., and T. Mizrahi,
              "Alternate-Marking Method for Passive and Hybrid
              Performance Monitoring", RFC 8321, DOI 10.17487/RFC8321,
              January 2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8321>.

   [RFC8491]  Tantsura, J., Chunduri, U., Aldrin, S., and L. Ginsberg,
              "Signaling Maximum SID Depth (MSD) Using IS-IS", RFC 8491,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8491, November 2018,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8491>.

Authors' Addresses

   Bruno Decraene (editor)
   Orange
   Email: bruno.decraene@orange.com

   Clarence Filsfils
   Cisco Systems, Inc.
   Belgium
   Email: cf@cisco.com

   Wim Henderickx
   Nokia
   Copernicuslaan 50
   95134 Antwerp 2018
   Belgium

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   Email: wim.henderickx@nokia.com

   Tarek Saad
   Juniper Networks
   Email: tsaad@juniper.net

   Vishnu Pavan Beeram
   Juniper Networks
   Email: vbeeram@juniper.net

   Luay Jalil
   Verizon
   Email: luay.jalil@verizon.com

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