Guidelines to support RTCP end-to-end in Back-to-Back User Agents (B2BUAs)
draft-ietf-straw-b2bua-rtcp-00

STRAW Working Group                                           L. Miniero
Internet-Draft                                                  Meetecho
Intended status: Standards Track                       S. Garcia Murillo
Expires: June 22, 2014                                           Medooze
                                                              V. Pascual
                                                                  Quobis
                                                       December 19, 2013

   Guidelines to support RTCP end-to-end in Back-to-Back User Agents
                                (B2BUAs)
                     draft-ietf-straw-b2bua-rtcp-00

Abstract

   SIP Back-to-Back User Agents (B2BUAs) are often envisaged to also be
   on the media path, rather than just intercepting signalling.  This
   means that B2BUAs often implement an RTP/RTCP stack as well, whether
   to act as media transcoders or to just passthrough the media
   themselves, thus leading to separate media legs that the B2BUA
   correlates and bridges together.  If not disciplined, though, this
   behaviour can severely impact the communication experience,
   especially when statistics and feedback information contained in RTCP
   packets get lost because of mismatches in the reported data.

   This document defines the proper behaviour B2BUAs should follow when
   also acting on the signalling/media plane in order to preserve the
   end-to-end functionality of RTCP.

Status of This Memo

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

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on June 22, 2014.

Copyright Notice

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   Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   3.  Signalling/Media Plane B2BUAs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Media Relay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.2.  Media-aware Relay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.3.  Media-terminator  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   6.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   7.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     7.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     7.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9

1.  Introduction

   Session Initiation Protocol [RFC3261] Back-to-Back User Agents
   (B2BUAs) are SIP entities that can act as a logical combination of
   both a User Agent Server (UAS) and a User Agent Client (UAC).  As
   such, their behaviour is not always completelely adherent to the
   standards, and can lead to unexpected situations the IETF is trying
   to address.  [I-D.ietf-straw-b2bua-taxonomy] presents a taxonomy of
   the most deployed B2BUA implementations, describing how they differ
   in terms of the functionality and features they provide.

   Such components often do not only act on the signalling plane, that
   is intercepting and possibly modifying SIP messages, but also on the
   media plane.  This means that, when on the signalling path between
   two parties willing to communicate, such components also manipulate
   the session description [RFC4566] in order to have all RTP and RTCP
   [RFC3550] pass through it as well.  The reasons for such a behaviour
   can be different: the B2BUA may want, for instance, to provide
   transcoding functionality for peers with incompatible codecs, or it

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   may need the traffic to be directly handled for different reasons
   like billing, lawful interception, session recording and so on.

   Whatever the reason, such a behaviour does not come without a cost.
   In fact, whenever a media-aware component is placed on the path
   between two peers that want to communicate by means of RTP/RTCP, the
   end-to-end nature of such protocols is broken, and their
   effectiveness may be affected as a consequence.  While this may not
   be a problem for RTP packets, which from a protocol point of view
   just contain opaque media packets and as such can be quite easily
   relayed, it definitely can cause serious issue for RTCP packets,
   which carry important information and feedback on the communication
   quality the peers are experiencing.  In fact, RTCP packets make use
   of specific ways to address the media they are referring to.
   Consider, for instance, the scenario depicted in Figure 1:

   +--------+              +---------+              +---------+
   |        |=== SSRC1 ===>|         |=== SSRC3 ===>|         |
   | Alice  |              |  B2BUA  |              |   Bob   |
   |        |<=== SSRC2 ===|         |<=== SSRC4 ===|         |
   +--------+              +---------+              +---------+

                   Figure 1: B2BUA modifying RTP headers

   In this common scenario, a party (Alice) is communicating with a peer
   (Bob) as a result of a signalling session managed by a B2BUA: this
   B2BUA is also on the media path between the two, and is acting as a
   media relay.  It is also, though, rewriting some of the RTP header
   information on the way, for instance because that's how its RTP
   relaying stack works: in this example, just the audio SSRC is
   changed, but more information may be changed as well (e.g., sequence
   numbers, timestamps, etc.).  In particular, whenever Alice sends an
   audio RTP packet, she adds her SSRC (SSRC1) to the RTP header; the
   B2BUA rewrites the SSRC (SSRC3) before relaying the packet to Bob. At
   the same time, RTP packets sent by Bob (SSRC4) get their SSRC
   rewritten as well (SSRC2) before being relayed to Alice.

   Assuming now that Alice needs to inform Bob she has lost several
   audio packets in the last few seconds, maybe because of a network
   congestion, she would of course place the related peer audio SSRC she
   is aware of (SSRC2), together with her own (SSRC1), in RTCP Reports
   and/or NACKS to do so, hoping for a retransmission or for Bob to slow
   down.  Since the B2BUA is making use of different SSRCs for the RTP
   communication with the party and the peer, a blind relaying of the
   RTCP packets to Bob would in this case result, from his perspective,
   in unknown SSRCs being addressed, thus resulting in the precious

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   information being dropped.  In fact, Bob is only aware of SSRCs SSRC4
   (the one he's originating) and SSRC3 (the one he's receiving from the
   B2BUA), and knows nothing about SSRCs SSRC1 and SSRC2 in the RTCP
   packets he receives.  As a consequence of the feedback being dropped,
   unaware of the issue Bob may continue to flood the party with even
   more media packets and/or not send Alice the packets she misses,
   which may easily lead to a very bad communication experience, if not
   eventually to an unwanted termination of the communication itself.

   This is just a simple example that, together with additional
   scenarios, will be addressed in the following sections.
   Nevertheless, it is a valid example of how such a trivial mishandling
   of precious information may lead to serious consequences.
   Considering how common B2BUA deployments are, it is very important
   for them to properly address such feedback, in order to be sure that
   their activities on the media plane do not break anything they're not
   supposed to.

2.  Terminology

   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].

3.  Signalling/Media Plane B2BUAs

   As anticipated in the introductory section, it's very common for
   B2BUA deployments to also act on the media plane, rather than just
   signalling alone.  In particular, [I-D.ietf-straw-b2bua-taxonomy]
   describes three different categories of such B2BUAs, according to the
   level of activities performed on the media plane: a B2BUA, in fact,
   may act as a simple media relay (1), effectively unaware of anything
   that is transported; it may be a media-aware relay (2), also
   inspecting and/or modifying RTP and RTCP packets as they flow by; or
   it may be a full-fledged media-termination entity, terminating and
   generating RTP and RTCP packets as needed.

   The following subsections will describe the proper behaviour B2BUAs,
   whatever above category they fall in, should follow in order to
   avoid, or at least minimize, any impact on end-to-end RTCP
   effectiveness.

3.1.  Media Relay

   A media relay as identified in [I-D.ietf-straw-b2bua-taxonomy]
   basically just forwards, from an application level point of view, all
   RTP and RTP packets it receives, without either inspecting or
   modifying them.  As such, B2BUA acting as media relays are not aware

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   of what traffic they're handling, meaning that not only the packet
   payloads are opaque to them, but headers as well.  Many Session
   Border Controllers (SBC) implement this kind of behaviour, e.g., when
   acting as a bridge between an inner and outer network.

   Considering all headers and identifiers in both RTP and RTCP are left
   untouched, issues like the SSRC mismatch described in the previous
   section would not occur.  Similar problems could occur, though,
   should the session description end up providing incorrect information
   about the media flowing (e.g., if the SDP on either side contain
   'ssrc' attributes that don't match the actual SSRC being advertized
   on the media plane) or about the supported RTCP mechanisms (e.g., in
   case the B2BUA advertized support for NACK because it implements it,
   but the original INVITE didn't).  Such an issue might occur, for
   instance, in case the B2BUA acting as a media relay is generating a
   new session description when bridging an incoming call, rather than
   taking into account the original session description in the first
   place.  This may cause the peers to find a mismatch between the SSRCs
   advertized in SDP and the ones actually observed in RTP and RTCP
   packets, or having them either ignore or generate RTCP feedback
   packets that were not explicitly advertized as supported.

   In order to prevent such an issue, a media-relay B2BUA SHOULD forward
   all the SSRC- and RTCP-related SDP attributes when handling a session
   setup between interested parties: this includes attributes like
   'ssrc' [RFC3261] and 'rtcp-fb' [RFC4585].  It SHOULD NOT, though,
   blindly forward all SDP attributes, as some of them (e.g.,
   candidates, fingerprints, crypto, etc.) may lead to call failures for
   different reasons out of scope to this document.

   Besides, it is worth mentioning that, leaving RTCP packets untouched,
   a media relay may also let through information that, according to
   policies, may be best left hidden or masqueraded, e.g., domain names
   in CNAME items.  Nevertheless, that information cannot break the end-
   to-end RTCP behaviour.

3.2.  Media-aware Relay

   A Media-aware relay, unlike the the Media Relay addressed in the
   previous section, is actually aware of the media traffic it is
   handling.  As such, it is able to inspect RTP and RTCP packets
   flowing by, and may even be able to modify the headers in any of them
   before forwarding them.  A B2BUA implementing this role would not,
   though, inspect the RTP payloads as well, which would be opaque to
   them.

   This makes them quite different from the Media Relay previously
   discussed, especially in terms of the potential issues that may occur

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   at the RTCP level.  In fact, being able to modify the RTP and RTCP
   headers, such B2BUAs may end up modifying RTP related information
   like SSRC, sequence numbers, timestamps and the like before
   forwarding packets from one peer to another.  This means that, if not
   properly disciplined, such a behaviour may easily lead to issues like
   the one described in the introductory section.

   As such, it is very important for a B2BUA modifying RTP-related
   information to also modify the same information in RTCP packets as
   well, and in a coherent way, so that not to confuse any of the peers
   involved in a communication.  Besides the behaviour already mandated
   for RTCP translators in Section 7.2 of [RFC3550], a media-aware B2BUA
   MUST also handle incoming RTCP messages to forward following this
   guideline:

   SR:  [RFC3550]
      If the B2BUA has changed the SSRC of any direction, it MUST update
      the SSRC-related information in the incoming SR packet before
      forwarding it.  This includes the sender SSRC, which MUST be
      replaced by the one the B2BUA uses to send RTP packets to the
      sender peer, and the SSRC information in all the blocks, which
      MUST be replaced using the related sender peer(s) SSRC.  If the
      B2BUA has also changed the base RTP sequence number when
      forwarding RTP packets, then this change needs to be properly
      addressed in the 'extended highest sequence number received' field
      in the Report Blocks.

   RR:  [RFC3550]
      The same guidelines given for SR apply for RR as well.

   SDES:  [RFC3550]
      If the B2BUA has changed the SSRC of any direction, it MUST update
      the SSRC-related information in all the chunks in the incoming
      SDES packet before forwarding it.

   BYE:  [RFC3550]
      If the B2BUA has changed the SSRC of any direction, it MUST update
      the SSRC in the BYE message.

   APP:  [RFC3550]
      If the B2BUA has changed the SSRC of any direction, it MUST update
      the SSRC in the BYE message.  Should the B2BUA be aware of any
      specific APP message format that contains additional information
      related to SSRCs, it SHOULD update them as well.

   Feedback messages:  [RFC4585]
      All Feedback messages have a common packet format, which includes
      the SSRC of the packet sender and the one of the media source the

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      feedack is related to.  Just as described for the previous
      messages, these SSRC identifiers MUST be updated if the B2BUA has
      changed the SSRC of any direction.  It MUST NOT, though, change a
      media source SSRC that was originally set to zero.  Besides,
      considering that many feedback messages also include additional
      data as part of their specific Feedback Control Information (FCI),
      a media-aware B2BUA MUST take care of them accordingly, if it can
      parse and regenerate them, according to the following guidelines.

   NACK:  [RFC4585]
      Besides the common packet format management for feedback messages,
      a media-aware B2BUA MUST also properly replace the Packet ID (PID)
      of all addressed lost packets in the NACK FCI if it changed the
      RTP sequence numbers before forwarding a packet.

   TMMBR/TMMBN/FIR/TSTR/TSTN/VBCM:  [RFC5104]
      Besides the common packet format management for feedback messages,
      a media-aware B2BUA MUST also properly replace the additional SSRC
      identifier all those messages envisage as part of their specific
      FCI if it changed the related RTP SSRC of the media sender.

   REMB:  [I-D.alvestrand-rmcat-remb]
      Besides the common packet format management for feedback messages,
      a media-aware B2BUA MUST also properly replace the additional SSRC
      identifier(s) REMB packets envisage as part of their specific FCI
      if it changed the related RTP SSRC of the media sender.

   Apart from the generic guidelines related to Feedback messages, no
   additional modifications are needed for PLI, SLI and RPSI feedback
   messages instead.

   Of course, the same considerations about the need for SDP and RTP/
   RTCP information to be coherent also applies to media-aware B2BUAs.
   This means that, if a B2BUA is going to change any SSRC, it SHOULD
   update the related 'ssrc' attributes if they were present in the
   original description before sending it to the recipient.  At the same
   time, the ability for a media-aware B2BUA to inspect/modify RTCP
   packets may also mean such a B2BUA may choose to drop RTCP packets it
   can't parse: in that case, a media-aware B2BUA SHOULD also advertize
   its RTCP level of support in the SDP in a coherent way, in order to
   prevent, for instance, a UAC to make use of NACK messages that would
   never reach the intended recipients.

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3.3.  Media-terminator

   A media-terminator B2BUA, unlike simple relays and media-aware ones,
   is also able to terminate media itself, that is taking care of RTP
   payloads as well and not only headers.  This means that such
   components, for instance, can act as media transcoders and/or
   originate specific RTP media.  Such a capability makes them quite
   different from the previously introduced B2BUA typologies, as this
   means they most likely are going to terminate RTCP as well: in fact,
   since the media is terminated by themselves, the related statistics
   and feedback functionality can be taken care directly by the B2BUA,
   and does not need to be relayed to the logical peer in the multimedia
   communication.

   For this reason, no specific guideline is needed to ensure a proper
   end-to-end RTCP behaviour in such scenarios, mostly because most of
   the times there would be no end-to-end RTCP interaction among the
   involved peers at all, as the B2BUA would terminate them all and take
   care of them accordingly.  Nevertheless, should any RTCP packet
   actually need to be delivered to the actual peer, the same guidelines
   provided for the media-aware B2BUA case apply.

4.  IANA Considerations

   This document makes no request of IANA.

5.  Security Considerations

   TBD.  Not any additional consideration to what the standards already
   give?  Probably this section will need a few words about how NOT
   following the guidelines can lead to security issues: e.g., not
   properly translating REMB messages can cause an increasing flow of
   media packets, that may be seen as attacks to devices that can't
   handle the amount of data.

6.  Acknowledgements

   TBD.

7.  References

7.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC3261]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston,
              A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E.

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              Schooler, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261,
              June 2002.

   [RFC4566]  Handley, M., Jacobson, V., and C. Perkins, "SDP: Session
              Description Protocol", RFC 4566, July 2006.

   [RFC3264]  Rosenberg, J. and H. Schulzrinne, "An Offer/Answer Model
              with Session Description Protocol (SDP)", RFC 3264, June
              2002.

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

7.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-straw-b2bua-taxonomy]
              Kaplan, H. and V. Pascual, "A Taxonomy of Session
              Initiation Protocol (SIP) Back-to-Back User Agents",
              draft-ietf-straw-b2bua-taxonomy-03 (work in progress),
              October 2013.

   [I-D.alvestrand-rmcat-remb]
              Alvestrand, H., "RTCP message for Receiver Estimated
              Maximum Bitrate", draft-alvestrand-rmcat-remb-03 (work in
              progress), October 2013.

   [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.

   [RFC5104]  Wenger, S., Chandra, U., Westerlund, M., and B. Burman,
              "Codec Control Messages in the RTP Audio-Visual Profile
              with Feedback (AVPF)", RFC 5104, February 2008.

   [RFC5576]  Lennox, J., Ott, J., and T. Schierl, "Source-Specific
              Media Attributes in the Session Description Protocol
              (SDP)", RFC 5576, June 2009.

Authors' Addresses

   Lorenzo Miniero
   Meetecho

   Email: lorenzo@meetecho.com

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   Sergio Garcia Murillo
   Medooze

   Email: sergio.garcia.murillo@gmail.com

   Victor Pascual
   Quobis

   Email: victor.pascual@quobis.com

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