CoRE Working Group C. Bormann Internet-Draft Universitaet Bremen TZI Intended status: Informational A. Betzler Expires: April 21, 2016 C. Gomez I. Demirkol Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Fundacio i2CAT October 19, 2015 CoAP Simple Congestion Control/Advanced draft-bormann-core-cocoa-03 Abstract The CoAP protocol needs to be implemented in such a way that it does not cause persistent congestion on the network it uses. The CoRE CoAP specification defines basic behavior that exhibits low risk of congestion with minimal implementation requirements. It also leaves room for combining the base specification with advanced congestion control mechanisms with higher performance. This specification defines some simple advanced CoRE Congestion Control mechanisms, Simple CoCoA. In the present version -02, it is making use of input from simulations and experiments in real networks. The specification might still benefit from simplifying it further. 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 http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 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 April 21, 2016. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2015 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 (http://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 Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Area of Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Advanced CoAP Congestion Control: RTO Estimation . . . . . . 4 4.1. Blind RTO Estimate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.2. Measured RTO Estimate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.2.1. Modifications to the algorithm of RFC 6298 . . . . . 5 4.2.2. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.3. Lifetime, Aging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Advanced CoAP Congestion Control: Non-Confirmables . . . . . 7 5.1. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 6. Advanced CoAP Congestion Control: Aggregate Congestion Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6.1. Proposed Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6.2. Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6.3. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 1. Introduction (See Abstract.) Extended rationale for this specification can be found in [I-D.bormann-core-congestion-control] and Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 [I-D.eggert-core-congestion-control], as well as in the minutes of the IETF 84 CoRE WG meetings. 1.1. Terminology This specification uses terms from [RFC7252]. In addition, it defines the following terminology: Initiator: The endpoint that sends the message that initiates an exchange. E.g., the party that sends a confirmable message, or a non-confirmable message conveying a request. 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] when they appear in ALL CAPS. These words may also appear in this document in lower case as plain English words, absent their normative meanings. (Note that this document is itself informational, but it is discussing normative statements.) The term "byte", abbreviated by "B", is used in its now customary sense as a synonym for "octet". 2. Context In the Vancouver IETF 84 CoRE meeting, a path forward was defined that includes a very simple basic scheme (lock-step with a number of parallel exchanges of 1) in the base specification together with performance-enhancing advanced mechanisms. The present specification is based on the approved text in the [RFC7252] base specification. It is making use of the text that permits advanced congestion control mechanisms and allows them to change protocol parameters, including NSTART and the binary exponential backoff mechanism. Note that Section 4.8 of [RFC7252] limits the leeway that implementations have in changing the CoRE protocol parameters. The present specification also assumes that, outside of exchanges, non-confirmable messages can only be used at a limited rate without an advanced congestion control mechanism (this is mainly relevant for [RFC7641]). It is also intended to address the [RFC5405] guideline about combining congestion control state for a destination; and to clarify its meaning for CoAP using the definition of an endpoint. The present specification does not address multicast or dithering beyond basic retransmission dithering. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 3. Area of Applicability The present algorithm is intended to be generally applicable. The objective is to be "better" than default CoAP congestion control in a number of characteristics, including achievable goodput for a given offered load, latency, and recovery from bursts, while providing more predictable stress to the network and the same level of safety from catastrophic congestion. It does require three state variables per scope plus the state needed to do RTT measurements, so it may not be applicable to the most constrained devices (class 1 as per [RFC7228]). The scope of each instance of the algorithm in the current set of evaluations has been the five-tuple, i.e., CoAP + endpoint (transport address) for Initiator and Responder. Potential applicability to larger scopes needs to be examined. 4. Advanced CoAP Congestion Control: RTO Estimation For an initiator that plans to make multiple requests to one destination endpoint, it may be worthwhile to make RTT measurements in order to obtain a better RTO estimation than that implied by the default initial timeout of 2 to 3 s. This is based on the usual algorithms for RTO estimation [RFC6298], with appropriately extended default/base values, as proposed in Section 4.2.1. Note that such a mechanism must, during idle periods, decay RTO estimates that are shorter or longer than the basic RTO estimate back to the basic RTO estimate, until fresh measurements become available again, as proposed in Section 4.3. One important consideration not relevant for TCP is the fact that a CoAP round-trip may include application processing time, which may be hard to predict, and may differ between different resources available at the same endpoint. Also, for communications with networks of constrained devices that apply radio duty cycling, large and variable round-trip times are likely to be observed. Servers will only trigger their early ACKs (with a non-piggybacked response to be sent later) based on the default timers, e.g. after 1 s. A client that has arrived at a RTO estimate shorter than 1 s SHOULD therefore use a larger backoff factor for retransmissions to avoid expending all of its retransmissions in the default interval of 2 to 3 s. A proposal for a mechanism with variable backoff factors is presented in Section 4.2.1. It may also be worthwhile to do RTT estimates not just based on information measured from a single destination endpoint, but also based on entire hosts (IP addresses) and/or complete prefixes (e.g., maintain an RTT estimate for a whole /64). The exact way this can be Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 used to reduce the amount of state in an initiator is for further study. 4.1. Blind RTO Estimate The initial RTO estimate for an endpoint is set to 2 seconds (the initial RTO estimate is used as the initial value for both E_weak_ and E_strong_ below). If only the initial RTO estimate is available, the RTO estimate for each of up to NSTART exchanges started in parallel is set to 2 s times the number of parallel exchanges, e.g. if two exchanges are already running, the initial RTO estimate for an additional exchange is 6 seconds. 4.2. Measured RTO Estimate The RTO estimator runs two copies of the algorithm defined in [RFC6298], as modified in Section 4.2.1: One copy for exchanges that complete on initial transmissions (the "strong estimator", E_strong_), and one copy for exchanges that have run into retransmissions, where only the first two retransmissions are considered (the "weak estimator", E_weak_). For the latter, there is some ambiguity whether a response is based on the initial transmission or the retransmissions. For the purposes of the weak estimator, the time from the initial transmission counts. Responses obtained after the third retransmission are not used to update an estimator. The overall RTO estimate is an exponentially weighted moving average (alpha = 0.5 and 0.25, respectively) computed of the strong and the weak estimator, which is evolved after each contribution to the weak estimator (1) or to the strong estimator (2), from the estimator that made the most recent contribution: RTO := 0.25 * E_weak_ + 0.75 * RTO (1) RTO := 0.5 * E_strong_ + 0.5 * RTO (2) (Splitting this update into the two cases avoids making the contribution of the weak estimator too big in naturally lossy networks.) 4.2.1. Modifications to the algorithm of RFC 6298 This subsection presents three modifications that must be applied to the algorithm of [RFC6298] as per this document. The first two Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 recommend new parameter settings. The third one is the variable backoff factor mechanism. The initial value for each of the two RTO estimators is 2 s. For the weak estimator, the factor K (the RTT variance multiplier) is set to 1 instead of 4. This is necessary to avoid a strong increase of the RTO in the case that the RTTVAR value is very large, which may be the case if a weak RTT measurement is obtained after one or more retransmissions. If an RTO estimation is lower than 1 s or higher than 3 s, instead of applying a binary backoff factor in both cases, a variable backoff factor is used. For RTO estimations below 1 s, the RTO for a retransmission is multiplied by 3, while for estimations above 3 s, the RTO is multiplied only by 1.5 (this updated choice of numbers to be verified by more simulations). This helps to avoid that exchanges with small initial RTOs use up all retransmissions in a short interval of time and exchanges with large initial RTOs may not be able to carry out all retransmissions within MAX_TRANSMIT_WAIT (93 s). The binary exponential backoff is truncated at 32 seconds. Similar to the way retransmissions are handled in the base specification, they are dithered between 1 x RTO and ACK_RANDOM_FACTOR x RTO. 4.2.2. Discussion In contrast to [RFC6298], this algorithm attempts to make use of ambiguous information from retransmissions. This is motivated by the high non-congestion loss rates expected in constrained node networks, and the need to update the RTO estimators even in the presence of loss. Additional investigation is required to determine whether this is indeed justified. Some evaluation has been done on earlier versions of this specification [Betzler2013]. A more recent (and more comprehensive) reference is [Betzler2015]. Additional investigation is required. 4.3. Lifetime, Aging The state of the RTO estimators for an endpoint SHOULD be kept as long as possible. If other state is kept for the endpoint (such as a DTLS connection), it is very strongly RECOMMENDED to keep the RTO state alive at least as long as this other state. It MUST be kept for at least 255 s. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 If an estimator has a value that is lower than 1 s, and it is left without further update for 16 times its current value, the RTO estimate is doubled. If an estimator has a value that is higher than 3 s, and it is left without further update for 4 times its current value, the RTO estimate is set to be RTO := 1 s + (0.5 * RTO) (Note that, instead of running a timer, it is possible to implement these RTO aging calculations cumulatively at the time the estimator is used next.) 5. Advanced CoAP Congestion Control: Non-Confirmables (TO DO: Align this with final consensus on -observe!) A CoAP endpoint MUST NOT send non-confirmables to another CoAP endpoint at a rate higher than defined by this document. Independent of any congestion control mechanisms, a CoAP endpoint can always send non-confirmables if their rate does not exceed 1 B/s. Non-confirmables that form part of exchanges are governed by the rules for exchanges. Non-confirmables outside exchanges (e.g., [RFC7641] notifications sent as non-confirmables) are governed by the following rules: 1. Of any 16 consecutive messages towards this endpoint that aren't responses or acknowledgments, at least 2 of the messages must be confirmable. 2. The confirmable messages must be sent under an RTO estimator, as specified in Section 4. 3. The packet rate of non-confirmable messages cannot exceed 1/RTO, where RTO is the overall RTO estimator value at the time the non- confirmable packet is sent. 5.1. Discussion This is relatively conservative. More advanced versions of this algorithm could run a TFRC-style Loss Event Rate calculator [RFC5348] and apply the TCP equation to achieve a higher rate than 1/RTO. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 6. Advanced CoAP Congestion Control: Aggregate Congestion Control (This section is still more experimental than the previous ones.) 6.1. Proposed Algorithm To avoid possible congestion when sending many packets to different destination endpoints in parallel, the overall number of outstanding interactions towards different destination endpoints should be limited. An upper limit PLIMIT determines the maximum number of outstanding interactions towards different destinations that are allowed in parallel. When a request is sent to a destination endpoint, PLIMIT is determined according to Equation (3) in the case that valid RTO information is already available for the destination endpoint, or using Equation (4) in case that no RTO information is available for the destination endpoint. PLIMIT = max(LAMBDA, LAMBDA*ACK_TIMEOUT)/mean(RTO)) (3) PLIMIT = LAMBDA (4) where LAMBDA determines the minimum value for the maximum number of allowed outstanding interactions and is suggested to be set to 4, and mean(RTO) is the average value of all valid RTO estimations maintained by the device. A new interaction may only be processed if the current overall number of outstanding interactions is lower than the PLIMIT calculated when the request is initiated. 6.2. Example In the following we give an example, with LAMBDA = 4 (our proposed default LAMBDA): Assume that a sender has so far obtained RTO estimations for two destination endpoints A (RTO = 0.5 s) and B (RTO = 1.5 s), and currently pcount (a variable which accounts for the number of outstanding interactions towards different endpoints) is equal to 0. Now three transactions are initiated consecutively in the following order: one for A, one for B and one for a new destination C. When an interaction with node A is initiated, PLIMIT is calculated: PLIMIT= max(4, (4*2 s)/mean(0.5 s, 1.5 s)) = max (4, 8 s/1 s) = max (4, 8) = 8 This means that with the current RTO information that the sender has obtained about the destination endpoints, up to 8 outstanding interactions to different endpoints would be allowed. By initiating Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 an interaction with A, pcount is increased to 1, which is still below PLIMIT. Thus, the interaction may be processed. The same applies to B: pcount increases to 2 after obtaining the same PLIMIT value of 8. Destination C is unknown to CoCoA, therefore the updated PLIMIT before processing the interaction with node C is 4. The CoAP request may be processed (pcount = 3). If two more interactions with different unknown destination endpoints would have been initiated, only the first one would have met the requirements to process it (PLIMIT = 4, pcount = 4). The second interaction would have increased pcount to 5, which is not permitted, since PLIMIT is 4. It may occur that pcount exceeds PLIMIT in particular cases, in this case, the interaction is not permitted as well. 6.3. Discussion The idea of the proposal is to allow more parallel transactions to different destination endpoints if we have low RTO estimations for them (which can be interpreted as good connections and low degree of congestion). If the RTO estimations are large or interactions with unknown destinations are initiated, the mechanism behaves more conservatively by reducing the maximum number of parallel interactions towards different destinations, but allowing at least LAMBDA outstanding interactions. If no RTO information is available for a destination endpoint, PLIMIT is simply set to be LAMBDA. If at any moment pcount would exceed PLIMIT, CoAP does not immediately perform the transaction. Further, it is important that in parallel, NSTART for each destination endpoint applies (which, for now, we assume to be 1). Overall, LAMBDA determines how aggressive/ conservative CoCoA behaves by default and it should be chosen carefully. It will be necessary to see whether this approach is effective in the sense that it avoids congestion in use cases where transactions to a multitude of different destination endpoints are initiated. An important aspect of such evaluations would be how the choice of LAMBDA affects the performance. On the other hand, a more safe approach would use max(RTO) instead of mean(RTO). Other concerns include the fact that the congestion degree of the paths to "known" endpoints influence whether a new interaction is permitted to some new endpoint which may be in very different conditions in terms of congestion. However, it is desirable to avoid adding a lot of complexity to the current CoCoA mechanisms. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 7. IANA Considerations This document makes no requirements on IANA. (This section to be removed by RFC editor.) 8. Security Considerations (TBD. The security considerations of, e.g., [RFC5681], [RFC2914], and [RFC5405] apply. Some issues are already discussed in the security considerations of [RFC7252].) 9. Acknowledgements The first document to examine CoAP congestion control issues in detail was [I-D.eggert-core-congestion-control], to which this draft owes a lot. Michael Scharf did a review of CoAP congestion control issues that asked a lot of good questions. Several Transport Area representatives made further significant inputs this discussion during IETF84, including Lars Eggert, Michael Scharf, and David Black. Andrew McGregor, Eric Rescorla, Richard Kelsey, Ed Beroset, Jari Arkko, Zach Shelby, Matthias Kovatsch and many others provided very useful additions. Authors from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya have been supported in part by the Spanish Government's Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad through projects TEC2009-11453 and TEC2012-32531, and FEDER. 10. References 10.1. 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, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>. [RFC2914] Floyd, S., "Congestion Control Principles", BCP 41, RFC 2914, DOI 10.17487/RFC2914, September 2000, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2914>. [RFC5405] Eggert, L. and G. Fairhurst, "Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers", BCP 145, RFC 5405, DOI 10.17487/RFC5405, November 2008, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5405>. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 [RFC6298] Paxson, V., Allman, M., Chu, J., and M. Sargent, "Computing TCP's Retransmission Timer", RFC 6298, DOI 10.17487/RFC6298, June 2011, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6298>. [RFC7252] Shelby, Z., Hartke, K., and C. Bormann, "The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)", RFC 7252, DOI 10.17487/ RFC7252, June 2014, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7252>. 10.2. Informative References [Betzler2013] Betzler, A., Gomez, C., Demirkol, I., and J. Paradells, "Congestion control in reliable CoAP communication", ACM MSWIM'13 p. 365-372, DOI 10.1145/2507924.2507954, 2013. [Betzler2015] Betzler, A., Gomez, C., Demirkol, I., and J. Paradells, "CoCoA+: an Advanced Congestion Control Mechanism for CoAP", Ad Hoc Networks Vol. 33 pp. 126-139, DOI 10.1016/ j.adhoc.2015.04.007, October 2015. [I-D.bormann-core-congestion-control] Bormann, C. and K. Hartke, "Congestion Control Principles for CoAP", draft-bormann-core-congestion-control-02 (work in progress), July 2012. [I-D.eggert-core-congestion-control] Eggert, L., "Congestion Control for the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)", draft-eggert-core- congestion-control-01 (work in progress), January 2011. [RFC5348] Floyd, S., Handley, M., Padhye, J., and J. Widmer, "TCP Friendly Rate Control (TFRC): Protocol Specification", RFC 5348, DOI 10.17487/RFC5348, September 2008, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5348>. [RFC5681] Allman, M., Paxson, V., and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion Control", RFC 5681, DOI 10.17487/RFC5681, September 2009, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5681>. [RFC7228] Bormann, C., Ersue, M., and A. Keranen, "Terminology for Constrained-Node Networks", RFC 7228, DOI 10.17487/ RFC7228, May 2014, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7228>. Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft CoAP Simple CoCoA October 2015 [RFC7641] Hartke, K., "Observing Resources in the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)", RFC 7641, DOI 10.17487/ RFC7641, September 2015, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7641>. Authors' Addresses Carsten Bormann Universitaet Bremen TZI Postfach 330440 Bremen D-28359 Germany Phone: +49-421-218-63921 Email: cabo@tzi.org August Betzler Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Fundacio i2CAT Departament d'Enginyeria Telematica C/Jordi Girona, 1-3 Barcelona 08034 Spain Email: august.betzler@entel.upc.edu Carles Gomez Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Fundacio i2CAT Escola d'Enginyeria de Telecomunicacio i Aeroespacial de Castelldefels C/Esteve Terradas, 7 Castelldefels 08860 Spain Phone: +34-93-413-7206 Email: carlesgo@entel.upc.edu Ilker Demirkol Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/Fundacio i2CAT Departament d'Enginyeria Telematica C/Jordi Girona, 1-3 Barcelona 08034 Spain Email: ilker.demirkol@entel.upc.edu Bormann, et al. Expires April 21, 2016 [Page 12]