Transport Area Working Group                                  B. Briscoe
Internet-Draft                                                  BT & UCL
Intended status: Informational                              T. Moncaster
Expires: May 15, 2008                                         L. Burness
                                                                      BT
                                                       November 12, 2007


       Problem Statement: We Don't Have To Do Fairness Ourselves
                 draft-briscoe-tsvwg-relax-fairness-00

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).

Abstract

   Nowadays resource sharing on the Internet is largely a result of what
   applications, users and operators do at run-time, rather than what
   the IETF designs into transport protocols at design-time.  The IETF
   now needs to recognise this trend and consider how to allow resource
   sharing to be properly controlled at run-time.




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Requirements Language

   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].


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  What Problem?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.1.  Two Incompatible Partial Worldviews  . . . . . . . . . . .  4
       2.1.1.  Overlooked Degrees of Freedom  . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     2.2.  Average Rates are a Run-Time Issue . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
     2.3.  Protocol Dynamics is the Design-Time Issue . . . . . . . .  9
   3.  Concrete Consequences of Unfairness  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     3.1.  Higher Investment Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
     3.2.  Losing Voluntarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
     3.3.  Networks using DPI to make Choices for Users . . . . . . . 13
     3.4.  Starvation during Anomalies and Emergencies  . . . . . . . 14
   4.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   5.  Conclusions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   6.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   7.  Comments Solicited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   8.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
     8.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
     8.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
   Editorial Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
   Appendix A.  Example Scenario  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     A.1.  Base Scenario  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     A.2.  Compounding Overlooked Degrees of Freedom  . . . . . . . . 20
     A.3.  Hybrid Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
     A.4.  Upgrading Makes Most Users Worse Off . . . . . . . . . . . 21
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
   Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 25
















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1.  Introduction

   The strength of the Internet is that any of the thousand million or
   so hosts may use nearly any network resource on the whole public
   Internet without asking, whether in access or core networks, wireless
   or fixed, local or remote.  The question of how each resource is
   shared is generally delegated to the congestion control algorithms
   available on each endpoint, most often TCP.

   We (the IETF) aim to ensure reasonably fair sharing of the congested
   resources of the Internet [RFC2914].  Specifically, the TCP algorithm
   aims to ensure every flow gets a roughly equal share of each
   bottleneck, measured in packets per round trip time [RFC2581].  But
   our efforts have become distorted by unfair use of protocols we
   intended to be fair, and further by the attempts of operators to
   correct the situation.  The problem is we aim to control fairness at
   protocol design-time, but resource shares are now primarily
   determined at run-time--as the outcome of a tussle between users, app
   developers and operators.

   For instance, about 35% of total traffic currently seen (Sep'07) at a
   core node on the public wireline Internet is p2p file-sharing {ToDo:
   Add ref}.  Even though file-sharing generally uses TCP, it uses the
   well-known trick of opening multiple connections--currently around
   100 actively transferring over different paths is not uncommon.  A
   competing Web application might open a couple of flows at a time, but
   perhaps only actively transfer data 1-10% of the time (its activity
   factor).  Combining 50x less flows and 10-100x lower activity factor
   means the traffic intensity from the Web app can be 500-5,000x less.
   However, despite being so much lighter on the network, it gets 50x
   less bit rate through the bottleneck.

   The design-time approach worked well enough during the early days of
   the Internet, because most users' activity factors and numbers of
   flows were in proportion to their access link rate.  But, now the
   Internet has to support a jostling mix of different attitudes to
   resource sharing: carelessness, unwitting self-interest, active self-
   interest, malice and sometimes even a little consideration for
   others.  So although TCP sets an important baseline, it is no longer
   the main determinant of how resources are shared between users at
   run-time.

   Just because we can no longer control resource sharing at design
   time, we aren't saying it isn't important.  In Section 3, we show
   that badly skewed resource sharing has serious concrete knock-on
   effects that are of great concern to the health of the Internet.

   And we are not saying the IETF is powerless to do anything to help.



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   However, our role must now be to create the run-time _policy
   framework_ within which users and operators can control relative
   resource shares.  So the debate is not about the IETF choosing
   between TCP-friendliness, max-min fairness, cost fairness or any
   other sort of fairness, because whatever we decide at design-time
   won't be strong enough to change what happens at run-time.  We need
   to focus on giving principled and enforceable control to users and
   operators, so they can agree between themselves which fair use policy
   they want locally [Rate_fair_Dis].

   The requirements for this resource sharing framework will be the
   subject of a future document, but the most important role of the IETF
   is to promote _understanding_ of the sorts of resource sharing that
   users and operators will want to use at run-time and to resolve the
   misconceptions and differences between them (Section 2.1).

   We are in an era where new congestion control requirements often
   involve starting more aggressively than TCP or going faster than TCP,
   or not responding to congestion as quickly as TCP.  By shifting
   control of fairness from design to run-time, we will free up all our
   new congestion control design work, so that it can first and foremost
   meet the objectives of these more demanding applications.  But we can
   still quantify, minimise and constrain the effect on others due to
   faster average rate and different dynamics (Section 2.3).  We can say
   now that the framework will have to encompass and endorse the
   practice of opening multiple flows, for instance.  But alongside
   recognition of such freedoms will come constraints, in order to
   balance the side-effects on other users over time.


2.  What Problem?

2.1.  Two Incompatible Partial Worldviews

   When looking at the current Internet, some people see a massive
   fairness problem, while others think there's hardly a problem at all.
   This is because two divergent ways of reasoning about resource
   sharing have developed in the industry:

   o  IETF guidelines on fair sharing of congested resources
      [RFC2357],[RFC2309],[RFC2914] have recommended that flows
      experiencing the same congested path should aim to achieve broadly
      equal window sizes, as TCP does [RFC2581].  We will characterise
      this as the "flow rate equality" worldview, shared by the IETF and
      large parts of the networking research community.[Note_Window]

   o  Network operators and Internet users tend to reason about the
      problem of resources sharing very differently.  Nowadays they do



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      not generally concern themselves with the rates of individual
      flows.  Instead they think in terms of the volume of data that
      different users transfer over a period [Res_p2p].  We will term
      this the "volume accounting" worldview.  They do not believe
      volume over a period (traffic intensity) is a measure of
      unfairness in itself, but they believe it should be _taken into
      account_ when deciding whether relative bit rates are fair.

   The most obvious distinction between the two worldviews is that flow
   rate equality is between _flows_, whereas volume accounting shares
   resources between _users_.  The IETF understands well that fairness
   is actually between users, but generally considers flow fairness to
   be a reasonable approximation as long as users aren't opening too
   many flows.

   However, there is a second much more subtle distinction.  The flow
   rate equality worldview discusses fair resource sharing in terms of
   bit rates, but operators and users reason about fair bit rates in the
   context of byte volume over a period.  Given bit rate is an
   instantaneous metric, it may aid understanding to convert 'volume
   over a period' into an instantaneous metric too.  The relevant metric
   is traffic intensity, which like traffic rate is an instantaneous
   metric, but it takes account of likely activity _over time_.  The
   traffic intensity from one user is the product of two metrics: i) the
   user's desired bit rate when active and ii) how often they are active
   over a period (their activity factor).

   Operators have to provision capacity based on the aggregate traffic
   intensity from all users over the busy period.  And many users think
   in terms of how much volume they can transfer over a period.  So,
   because traffic intensity is equivalent to 'volume over a period',
   both operators and users often effectively share the same worldview.

   To further aid understanding, Appendix A presents an example scenario
   where heavy users compete for a bottleneck with light users.  It has
   enough similarities to the current Internet to be relevant, but it
   has been stripped to its bare essentials to allow the main issues to
   be grasped.

   The base scenario in Appendix A.1 starts with the light users having
   TCP connections open for less of the time than heavy users (a lower
   activity factor).  But, when they are active, they open as many
   connections as heavy users.  It shows that users with a lower
   activity factor transfer less volume of traffic through the
   bottleneck over a period because, even though TCP gives roughly equal
   rate to each flow, the heavy users' flows are present more of the
   time.




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   The volume accounting view is _not_ that it is unfair for some users
   to transfer more volume than others--afterall the lighter users have
   less traffic that they want to send.  However, they believe it is
   reasonable for users who put a heavier load on the system to be given
   less bottleneck bit rate than lighter users.

   Appendix A.2 continues the example, giving the heavy users the added
   advantage of using 50x multiple flows, just as they do on the current
   Internet.  When multiple flows are compounded with their higher
   activity factors, they can get 500-2,000x greater traffic intensity
   through the bottleneck.

   Certainly, the flow rate equality worldview recognises that opening
   50x more flows than other users starts to become a serious fairness
   problem, because some users get 50x more bit rate through a
   bottleneck than others.  But the volume accounting worldview sees
   this as a much bigger problem.  They first see 2,000x heavier use of
   the bottleneck over time, then they judge that _also_ getting 50x
   greater bit rate seems seriously unfair.

   But are these numbers realistic?  Attended use of something like the
   Web might typically have an activity factor of 1-10%, while
   unattended apps approach 100%.  A Web browser might typically open
   two TCPs when active [RFC2616], while a p2p file-sharing app on a
   512kbps upstream DSL line actively uses anything from 40-500
   connections [az-calc].  Heavy users generally compound the two
   factors together (10-100x greater activity factor and 20-250x more
   connections), achieving anything from 200x to 25,000x greater traffic
   intensity through a bottleneck than light users.

   The above question of what size the different worldviews think
   resource shares _should_ be is separate from the question of whether
   to _enforce_ them and how to (see Section 3.2).  Within the volume
   accounting worldview, many operators (particularly in Europe) already
   limit the bit rate of their heaviest users at peak times in order to
   protect the experience of the majority of their
   customers.[Note_Neutral] But, enforcement is a separate question.
   Although prevalent use of TCP seems to be continuing without any
   enforcement, even the flow rate equality worldview generally accepts
   that opening excessive multiple connections can't be solved
   voluntarily.  Quoting RFC2914, "...instead of a spiral of
   increasingly aggressive transport protocols, we ... have a spiral of
   increasingly ... aggressive applications").

   To summarise so far, one industry worldview aims for equal flow
   rates, while the other prefers an outcome with very unequal flow
   rates.  Even though they both share the same intentions of fairer
   resource sharing, the two worldviews have developed subgoals that are



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   fundamentally at odds.

2.1.1.  Overlooked Degrees of Freedom

   So which worldview is correct?  Actually, our reason for pointing out
   these divergent worldviews is to show that both contain valuable
   insights, but that each also highlights weaknesses in the other.
   Given our audience is the IETF, we have tried to explain the volume
   accounting worldview in terms of flow rate equality, but volume
   accounting is by no means rigorous or complete itself.  Table 1
   identifies the three degrees of freedom of resource sharing that are
   missing in one or the other of the two worldviews.

     +----------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
     | Degree of Freedom    | Flow Rate Equality | Volume Accounting |
     +----------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
     | Activity factor      |          X         |         Y         |
     | Multiple flows       |          X         |         Y         |
     | Congestion variation |          Y         |         X         |
     +----------------------+--------------------+-------------------+

   Table 1: Resource Sharing Degrees of Freedom Encompassed by Different
                      Worldviews; Y = yes and X = no.

   Activity factor:  We have already pointed out how flow rate equality
      does not take different activity factors into account.  On the
      other hand, volume accounting naturally takes the on-off activity
      of flows into account, because in the process of counting volume
      over time, the off periods are naturally excluded.

   Multiple flows:  Similarly, it is well-known [RFC2309] [RFC2914] that
      flow rate equality does not make allowance for multiple flows,
      whereas counting volume naturally includes all flows from a user,
      whether they terminate at the same remote endpoint or many
      different ones.

   Congestion variation:  Flow rate equality, of course, takes full
      account of how congested different bottlenecks are at different
      times, ensuring that the same volume must be squeezed out over a
      longer duration, the more flows it competes with.  However, volume
      accounting doesn't recognise that congestion can vary by orders of
      magnitude, making it fairly useless for encouraging congestion
      control.  The best it can do is only count volume during a 'peak
      period', effectively considering congestion as either 1 everywhere
      during this time or 0 everywhere otherwise.

   These clearly aren't just problems of detail.  Having each overlooked
   whole dimensions of the problem, both worldviews seem to require a



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   fundamental rethink.  In a future document defining the requirements
   for a new resource sharing framework, we plan to unify both
   worldviews.  But, in the present problem statement, it is sufficient
   to register that we need to reconcile the fundamentally contradictory
   worldviews that the industry has developed about resource sharing.

2.2.  Average Rates are a Run-Time Issue

   A less obvious difference between the two worldviews is that flow
   rate equality tries to control resource shares at design-time, while
   volume accounting controls resource shares once the run-time
   situation is known.  Also the volume accounting worldview actually
   involves two separate functions: passive monitoring and active
   intervention.  So, importantly, the run-time questions of whether to
   and how to intervene can depend on policy.

   The "spiral of increasingly aggressive applications" [RFC2914] has
   shifted the resource sharing problem out of the IETF's design-time
   space, making flow rate equality insufficient (or perhaps even
   inappropriate) in technical and in policy terms:

   Technical:  At design time, it is impossible to know whether a
      congestion control will be fair at run-time without knowing more
      about the run-time situation it will be used in--how long flow
      durations will be and whether users will open multiple flows.

   Policy:  At design time, we cannot (and should not) prejudge the
      'fair use' policy that has been agreed between users and their
      network operators.

   A transport protocol can no longer be made 'fair' at design time--it
   all now depends how 'unfairly' it is used at run-time, and what has
   been agreed as 'unfair'.

   However, we are not saying that volume accounting is the answer.  It
   just gives us the insight that resource sharing has to be controlled
   at run-time by policy, not at design-time by the IETF.  Volume
   accounting would be more useful if it took a more precise approach to
   congestion than either 'everything is congested' or 'nothing is
   congested'.

   What operators and users need from the IETF is a framework to judge
   and to control resource sharing at run-time.  It needs to work across
   all a user's flows (like volume accounting).  It needs to take
   account of idle periods over time (like volume accounting).  And it
   needs to take account of congestion variation (like flow rate
   equality).




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2.3.  Protocol Dynamics is the Design-Time Issue

   Although fairness is a run-time issue, at protocol design-time it
   requires more from the IETF than just a policy control framework.
   Policy can control the _average_ amount of congestion that a
   particular application causes, but the Internet also needs the
   collective expertise of the IETF and the IRTF to standardise best
   practice in the _dynamics_ of transport protocols.  The IETF has a
   duty to provide standard transports with a response to congestion
   that is always safe and robust.  But the hard part is to keep the
   network safe while still meeting the needs of more demanding
   applications (e.g. high speed transfer of data objects or media
   streaming that can adapt its rate but not too abruptly).

   If we assume for a moment that we will have a framework to judge and
   control _average_ rates, we will still need a framework to assess
   which proposed congestion controls make the trade-off between
   achieving the task effectively and minimising congestion caused to
   others, during _dynamics_:

   o  The faster a new flow accelerates the more packets it will have in
      flight when it detects its first loss, potentially leading many
      other flows to experience a long burst of losses as queues
      overrun.  When is a fast start fast enough?  Or too fast
      [RFC3742]?

   o  One way for a small number of high speed flows to better utilise a
      high speed link is to respond more smoothly to congestion events
      than TCP's rate-halving saw-tooth does [proprietary fast TCPs]
      [FAST],[RFC3649].  But then new flows will take much longer to
      'push-in' and reach a high rate themselves.

   o  Transports like TCP-friendly rate control [proprietary media
      players], [RFC3448], [RFC4828] are designed to respond more
      smoothly to congestion than TCP.  But even if a TFRC flow has the
      same average bit rate as a TCP flow, the more sluggish it is, the
      more congestion it will cause [Rate_fair_Dis].  How do we decide
      how much smoother we should go?  How large a proportion of
      Internet traffic could we allow to be unresponsive to congestion
      over long durations, before we were at risk of causing growing
      periods of congestion collapse [RFC2914]?[Note_Collapse]

   o  TFRC has been proposed as a possible way for aggregates of flows
      crossing the public Internet to respond to congestion (pseudo-wire
      emulations may contain flows that cannot, or do not want to
      respond quickly to congestion themselves)
      [I-D.rosen-pwe3-congestion],
      [I-D.ietf-capwap-protocol-specification], [TSV_CAPWAP_issues].



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      But it doesn't make any sense to insist that, wherever flows are
      aggregated together into one identifiable bundle, the whole bundle
      of perhaps hundreds of flows must keep to the same mean rate as a
      single TCP flow.

   In view of the continual demand for alternate congestion controls,
   the IETF has recently agreed a new process for standardising them
   [ion-tsv-alt-cc].  The IETF will use the expertise of the IRTF
   Internet congestion control research group, governed by agreed
   general guidelines for the design of new congestion controls
   [RFC5033].  However, in writing those guidelines it proved very
   difficult to give any specific guidance on where a line could be
   drawn between fair and unfair protocols.  The best we could do were
   phrases like, "Alternate congestion controllers that have a
   significantly negative impact on traffic using standard congestion
   control may be suspect..." and "In environments with multiple
   competing flows all using the same alternate congestion control
   algorithm, the proposal should explore how bandwidth is shared among
   the competing flows."

   Once we have agreed that average behaviour should be a policy issue,
   we can focus on the dynamic behaviour of congestion controls, which
   is where the important standards issues lie, such as preventing
   congestion collapse or preventing new flows causing bursts of
   congestion by unnecessarily overrunning as they seek out the
   operating point of their path.

   As always, the IETF will not want to standardise aspects where
   implementers can gain an edge over their competitors, but we must set
   standards to prevent serious harm to the stability and usefulness of
   the Internet, and to make transports available that avoid causing
   _unnecessary_ congestion in the course of achieving any particular
   application objective.


3.  Concrete Consequences of Unfairness

   People have different levels of tolerance for unfairness.  Even when
   we agree how to measure fairness, there are a range of views on how
   unfair the situation needs to get before the IETF should do anything
   about it.  Nonetheless, lack of fairness can lead to more concretely
   pathological knock-on effects.  Even if we don't particularly care if
   some users get more than their fair share and others less, we should
   care about the more concrete knock-on effects below.







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3.1.  Higher Investment Risk

   Some users want more Internet capacity to transfer large volumes of
   data, while others want more capacity to be able to interact more
   quickly with other sites and other users.  We have called these heavy
   and light users, although of course, many users are mix of the two in
   differing proportions.

   We have shown that heavy users can use applications that open
   multiple connections, so that TCP gives the light users very little
   of a bottleneck.  But unfortunately, upgrading capacity does little
   for the light users unless the heavy users run out of data to send
   (which doesn't tend to happen often).  In the reasonably realistic
   example in Appendix A.4, the light users start off only being able to
   use 10kbps of their 2Mbps line because heavy users are skewing the
   sharing of the bottleneck by using multiple flows.  But a 4x upgrade
   to the bottleneck, which should add 500kbps per user if shared
   equally, only gives the light users 30kbps extra.

   But, the upgrade has to be paid for.  A commercial ISP will generally
   pass on the cost equally to all its customers through its monthly
   fees.  So, to rub salt in the wound, the light users end up paying
   the cost of this 500kbps upgrade but we have seen they only get
   30kbps.  Ultimately, extreme unfairness in the sharing of capacity
   tends to drive operators to stop investing in capacity.  Because all
   the light users, who experience so little of the benefit, won't be
   prepared to pay an equal share to recover the costs--the ISP risks
   losing them to a 'fairer' competitor.

   But there seems to be plenty of evidence that operators around the
   world are still investing in capacity growth despite the prevalence
   of TCP.  How can this be, if flow rate equality makes investment so
   risky?  One explanation, particularly in parts of Asia, is that some
   investments are Governernment subsidised.  In the US, the explanation
   is probably more down to weak competition.  In Europe, the main
   explanation is that many commercial operators haven't allowed their
   networks to become as unfair as the above example--they have made
   resource sharing fairer by _overriding_ TCP's flow rate equality.

   Competitive operators in many countries limit the volume transferred
   by heavy users, particularly at peak times.  They have effectively
   overriden flow rate equality to achieve a different allocation of
   resources that they believe is better for the majority of their
   customers (and consequently better for their competitive position).
   Typically these operators use a combination of tiered pricing of
   volume caps and throttling of the heaviest so-called 'unlimited'
   users at peak times.  In this way they have removed some of the
   investment risk that would otherwise have resulted if flow rate



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   equality had been relied on to share congested resources.

3.2.  Losing Voluntarism

   Throughout the early years of the Internet, flow rate equality
   resulted in approximate fairness that most people considered
   sufficient.  This was because most users' traffic during peak hours
   tended to correlate with their access rate.  Those who bought high
   capacity access also generally sent more traffic at peak times (e.g.
   heavy users or server farms).

   As higher access rates have become more affordable, this happy
   coincidence has been eroded.  Some people only require their higher
   access rate occasionally, while others require it more continuously.
   But once they all have more access capacity, even those who don't
   really require it all the time often fill it anyway--as long as
   there's nothing to dissuade them.  People tend to use what they
   desire, not just what they require.

   Of course, more access traffic requires more shared capacity at
   relevant network bottlenecks.  But if we rely on TCP to share out
   these bottlenecks, we have seen how those who just desire more can
   swamp those who require more (Section 3.1).

   Some operators have continued to provision sufficiently excessive
   shared capacity and just passed the cost on to all their customers.
   But many operators have found that those customers who don't actually
   require all that shared infrastructure would rather not have to pay
   towards its cost.  So, to avoid losing customers, they have
   introduced tiered volume limits (this hasn't happened in the US yet
   though).  It is well known that many users are averse to
   unpredictable charges [PMP] (S.5), so many now choose ISPs who limit
   their volume (with suitable override facilities) rather than charge
   more when they use more.

   Thus, we are seeing a move away from voluntary restraint (within peak
   access rates) towards a preference for enforced fairness, as long as
   the user stays in overall control.  This has implications on the
   Internet infrastructure that the IETF needs to recognise and address.
   Effectively, parts of the best effort Internet are becoming like the
   other Diffserv classes, with traffic policers and traffic
   conditioning agreements (TCAs [RFC2475]), albeit volume-based rather
   than rate and burst-based TCAs.  (In fact, the addition of congestion
   accounting or policing need not be confined to just the best effort
   class.)

   We are not saying that the Internet _requires_ fairness enforcement,
   merely that it has become prevalent.  We need to acknowledge the



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   trend towards enforcement to ensure that it does not introduce
   unnecessary complexity into the basic functioning of the Internet,
   and that our current approach to fairness (embedded in endpoint
   congestion control) remains compatible with this changing world.  For
   instance, when a rate policer introduces drops, are they equivalent
   to drops due to congestion? are they equivalent to drops when you
   exceed your own access rate? do we need to tell the difference?

3.3.  Networks using DPI to make Choices for Users

   We have seen how network operators might well believe it is in their
   customers' interests to override the resource sharing decisions of
   TCP.  They seem to have sound reasons for throttling their heaviest
   users at peak times.  But this is leading to a far more controversial
   side-effect: network operators have started making performance
   choices between _applications_ on behalf of their customers.

   Once operators start throttling heavy users, they hit a problem.
   Most heavy volume users are actually a mix of the two types
   characterised in our example scenario (Appendix A).  Some of their
   traffic is attended and some is unattended.  If the operator
   throttles all traffic from a heavy user indiscriminately, it will
   severely degrade the customer's attended applications, but it
   actually only needs to throttle the unattended applications to
   protect the traffic of others.

   Ideally, the threat of heavy throttling of all a user's traffic would
   encourage the user to self-throttle the traffic she least valued, in
   order to avoid the operator's indiscriminate throttling.  But many
   users these days have neither the expertise nor the software to do
   this.  Instead, operators have generally decided to infer what they
   think the user would do, using readily available deep packet
   inspection (DPI) equipment.

   An operator may infer customer priorities with honourable intentions,
   but such activity is easily confusible with attempts to discriminate
   against certain applications that the operator happens not to like.
   Also customers get understandably upset every time the operator
   guesses their priorities wrongly.

   It is well documented (but less well-known) that user priorities are
   task-specific, not application-specific [AppVsTask].  P2p filesharing
   can be used for downloading music with some vague intent to listen to
   it some day soon, or to download a critical security patch.  User
   intent cannot be inferred at the network layer just by working out
   what the application is.  The end-to-end design principle [RFC1958]
   warns that a function should only be implemented at a lower layer
   after trying really hard to implement it at a higher layer.



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   Otherwise, the network layer gradually becomes specialised around the
   functions and priorities of the moment--the middlebox problem
   [RFC3234].

   To address this problem of feature creep into the network layer, we
   need to understand whether there are valid reasons why this DPI is
   being deployed to override TCP's decisions.  We shouldn't deny the
   existence of a problem just because one solution to it breaks a
   fundamental Internet design principle.  We should instead find a
   better solution.

3.4.  Starvation during Anomalies and Emergencies

   The problems due to unfairness that we have outlined so far all arise
   when the Internet is working normally.  However, fairness concerns
   become far more acute when a part of the Internet infrastructure
   becomes extremely stressed, either because there's much more traffic
   than expected (e.g. flash crowds), or much less capacity than
   expected (e.g. physical attack, accident, disaster).

   Under non-disaster conditions, we have already said that fair sharing
   of congested resources is a matter that should be decided between
   users and their providers at run-time.  Often that will mean "you get
   what you've paid for" becomes the rule, at least in commercial parts
   of the Internet.  But during really acute emergencies many people
   would expect such commercial concerns to be set aside
   [I-D.floyd-tsvwg-besteffort].

   We agree that users shouldn't be able to squeeze out others during
   emergencies.  But the mechanisms we have in place at the moment don't
   allow anyone to control whether this happens or not, because they can
   be overriden at run-time by using the extra degress of freedom
   available to get round TCP.  It could equally be argued that each
   user (not each flow) should get an equal share of remaining capacity
   in an emergency.  Indeed, it would seem wrong for one user to expect
   100 continuously running flows downloading music & videos to take 100
   times more capacity than other users sending brief flows containing
   messages trying to contact loved ones or the emergency services
   [Hengchun_quake].[Note_Earthquake]

   We argue that fairness during emergencies is, more than anything
   else, a policy matter to be decided at run-time (either before or
   during an anomaly) by users, operators, regulators and governments--
   not at design time by the IETF.  The IETF should however provide the
   framework within which typical policies can be enforced.  And the
   IETF should ensure that the Internet is still likely to utilise
   resources _efficiently_ under extreme stress, assuming a reasonable
   mix of likely policies, including none.



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   The main take-away point from this section is that the IETF should
   not, and need not, make such life-and-death decisions.  It should
   provide protocols that allow any of these policy options to be chosen
   at the time of need or by making contingencies beforehand.  The
   congestion accountability framework in {ToDo: ref sister doc}
   provides such control, while also allowing different controls
   (including no control at all) in normal circumstances.  For instance
   an ISP might normally allow its customers to pay to override any
   usage limits.  But during a disaster it might suspend this right.
   Then users would get only the shares they had established before the
   disaster broke out (the ISP would thus also avoid accusations of
   profiteering from people's misery).  Whatever, it is not for the IETF
   to embed answers to questions like these in our protocols.


4.  Security Considerations

   {ToDo:}


5.  Conclusions

   {ToDo:}


6.  Acknowledgements

   Arnaud Jacquet, Phil Eardley.


7.  Comments Solicited

   Comments and questions are encouraged and very welcome.  They can be
   addressed to the IETF Transport Area working group mailing list
   <tsvwg@ietf.org>, and/or to the authors.


8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

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

   [RFC2309]  Braden, B., Clark, D., Crowcroft, J., Davie, B., Deering,
              S., Estrin, D., Floyd, S., Jacobson, V., Minshall, G.,
              Partridge, C., Peterson, L., Ramakrishnan, K., Shenker,
              S., Wroclawski, J., and L. Zhang, "Recommendations on



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              Queue Management and Congestion Avoidance in the
              Internet", RFC 2309, April 1998.

   [RFC2581]  Allman, M., Paxson, V., and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion
              Control", RFC 2581, April 1999.

   [RFC2914]  Floyd, S., "Congestion Control Principles", BCP 41,
              RFC 2914, September 2000.

8.2.  Informative References

   [AppVsTask]
              Bouch, A., Sasse, M., and H. DeMeer, "Of packets and
              people: A user-centred approach to Quality of Service",
              Proc. IEEE/IFIP Proc. International Workshop on QoS
              (IWQoS'00) , May 2000,
              <http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Bouch/42-171796908.ps>.

   [FAST]     Jin, C., Wei, D., and S. Low, "FAST TCP: Motivation,
              Architecture, Algorithms, and Performance", Proc. IEEE
              Conference on Computer Communications (Infocom'04) ,
              March 2004,
              <http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2004/Papers/52_2.PDF>.

   [Hengchun_quake]
              Wikipedia, "2006 Hengchun earthquake", Wikipedia Web page
              (accessed Oct'07) , 2006,
              <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Hengchun_earthquake>.

   [I-D.floyd-tsvwg-besteffort]
              Floyd, S. and M. Allman, "Comments on the Usefulness of
              Simple Best-Effort Traffic",
              draft-floyd-tsvwg-besteffort-01 (work in progress),
              August 2007.

   [I-D.ietf-capwap-protocol-specification]
              Calhoun, P., "CAPWAP Protocol Specification",
              draft-ietf-capwap-protocol-specification-07 (work in
              progress), June 2007.

   [I-D.rosen-pwe3-congestion]
              Rosen, E., "Pseudowire Congestion Control Framework",
              draft-rosen-pwe3-congestion-04 (work in progress),
              October 2006.

   [PMP]      Odlyzko, A., "A modest proposal for preventing Internet
              congestion", AT&T technical report TR 97.35.1,
              September 1997,



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              <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/modest.proposal.pdf>.

   [RFC1958]  Carpenter, B., "Architectural Principles of the Internet",
              RFC 1958, June 1996.

   [RFC2357]  Mankin, A., Romanov, A., Bradner, S., and V. Paxson, "IETF
              Criteria for Evaluating Reliable Multicast Transport and
              Application Protocols", RFC 2357, June 1998.

   [RFC2475]  Blake, S., Black, D., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, Z.,
              and W. Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated
              Services", RFC 2475, December 1998.

   [RFC2616]  Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,
              Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext
              Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.

   [RFC3234]  Carpenter, B. and S. Brim, "Middleboxes: Taxonomy and
              Issues", RFC 3234, February 2002.

   [RFC3448]  Handley, M., Floyd, S., Padhye, J., and J. Widmer, "TCP
              Friendly Rate Control (TFRC): Protocol Specification",
              RFC 3448, January 2003.

   [RFC3649]  Floyd, S., "HighSpeed TCP for Large Congestion Windows",
              RFC 3649, December 2003.

   [RFC3742]  Floyd, S., "Limited Slow-Start for TCP with Large
              Congestion Windows", RFC 3742, March 2004.

   [RFC4828]  Floyd, S. and E. Kohler, "TCP Friendly Rate Control
              (TFRC): The Small-Packet (SP) Variant", RFC 4828,
              April 2007.

   [RFC5033]  Floyd, S. and M. Allman, "Specifying New Congestion
              Control Algorithms", BCP 133, RFC 5033, August 2007.

   [Rate_fair_Dis]
              Briscoe, B., "Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion",
              ACM CCR 37(2)63--74, April 2007,
              <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1232926>.

   [Res_p2p]  Cho, K., Fukuda, K., Esaki, H., and A. Kato, "The Impact
              and Implications of the Growth in Residential User-to-User
              Traffic", ACM SIGCOMM CCR 36(4)207--218, October 2006,
              <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1151659.1159938>.

   [TSV_CAPWAP_issues]



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              Borman, D. and IESG, "Transport Issues in CAPWAP", In
              Proc. IETF-69 CAPWAP w-g, July 2007, <http://
              www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07jul/slides/capwap-1.pdf>.

   [az-calc]  Infinite-Source, "Azureus U/L settings calculator", Web
              page (accessed Oct'07) , 2007,
              <http://infinite-source.de/az/az-calc.html>.

   [ion-tsv-alt-cc]
              "Experimental Specification of New Congestion Control
              Algorithms", July 2007,
              <http://www.ietf.org/IESG/content/ions/
              ion-tsv-alt-cc.txt>.

Editorial Comments

   [Note_Collapse]    Some would say that it is not a congestion
                      collapse if congestion control automatically
                      recovers the situation after a while. However,
                      even though lack of autorecovery would be truly
                      devastating, it isn't part of the definition
                      [RFC2914].

   [Note_Earthquake]  On 26 Dec 2006, the Hengchun earthquake caused
                      faults on 12 of the 18 undersea cables passing
                      between Taiwan and the Philippines. The Internet
                      was virtually unusable for those trying to make
                      their emergency arrangements over these cables (as
                      well as for much of Asia generally). Each of these
                      flows was still having to compete with the
                      multiple flows of video downloads for remote users
                      who were presumably oblivious to the fact they
                      were consuming much of the surviving capacity.
                      When the Singaporean ISP, SingNet, announced
                      restoration of service before the cables were
                      repaired, it revealed that it had achieved this at
                      the expense of video downloads and gaming traffic
                      .

   [Note_Neutral]     Enforcement of /overall/ traffic limits within an
                      agreed acceptable use policy is a completely
                      different question to that of whether operators
                      should disciminate against /specific/ applications
                      or service providers (but they are confusible&
                      mdash;see the section on DPI.

   [Note_Window]      Within the flow rate equality worldview, there are
                      differences in views over whether window sizes



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                      should be compared in packets or bytes, and
                      whether a longer round trip time (RTT) should
                      reduce the target rate or merely slow down how
                      quickly the rate changes in order to reach a
                      target rate that is independent of RTT [FAST].
                      However, although these details are important,
                      they are merely minor internal differences within
                      the flow rate equality worldview when compared
                      against the differences with volume accounting.


Appendix A.  Example Scenario

A.1.  Base Scenario

   We will consider 100 users all sharing a link from the Internet with
   2Mbps downstream access capacity.  Eighty bought their line for
   occasional flurries of activity like browsing the Web, booking their
   travel arrangements or reading their email.  The other twenty bought
   it mainly for unattended volume transfer of large files.  We will
   call these two types of use attended (or light) and unattended (or
   heavy).  Ignoring the odd UDP packet, we will assume all these
   applications use TCP congestion control, and that all flows have
   approximately equal round trip times.

   Imagine the network operator has provisioned the shared link for a
   contention ratio of 20:1, ie 100x2Mbps/20 = 10Mbps.  For simplicity,
   we assume a 16hr 'day' and that the attended use is only in the
   'day', while unattended use is always present, having the night to
   itself.

   During the 'day', flows from the sixty attended users come and go
   with about 1 in 10 actively downloading flows at any one time (a
   downstream activity factor of 10%).  To start with, we will further
   assume that, when active, every user has approximately the same
   number of flows open, whether attended or unattended.  So, once all
   flows have stabilised, at any instant TCP will ensure every user
   (when active) gets about 10Mbps/(80*10% + 20*100%) = 357kbps of the
   bottleneck.

   Table 2 tabulates the salient features of this scenario.  Also the
   rightmost column shows the volume transferred per user during the
   day, and for completeness the bottom row shows the aggregate.








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   +------------+----------+------------+--------------+---------------+
   |    Type of |   No. of | Activ- ity |     Day rate |    Day volume |
   |        use |    users |     factor | /user (16hr) |  /user (16hr) |
   +------------+----------+------------+--------------+---------------+
   |   Attended |       80 |        10% |      357kbps |         257MB |
   | Unattended |       20 |       100% |      357kbps |        2570MB |
   |            |          |            |              |               |
   |  Aggregate |      100 |            |       10Mbps |          72GB |
   +------------+----------+------------+--------------+---------------+

   Table 2: Base Scenario assuming 100% utilisation of 10Mbps bottleneck
    and each user runs approx. equal numbers of flows with equal RTTs.

   This scenario is not meant to be an accurate model of the current
   Internet, for instance:

   o  Utilisation is never 100%.

   o  Upstream not downstream constrains most p2p apps on DSL (but not
      all fixed & wireless access technologies).

   o  The activity factor of 10% in our base example scenario is perhaps
      an optimistic estimate for attended use over a 16hr peak period.
      1% is just as likely for many users (before file-sharing became
      popular, DSL networks were provisioned for a contention ratio of
      about 25:1, aiming to handle a peak average activity factor of 4%
      across all user types).

   o  And rather than falling into two neat categories, users sit on a
      wide spectrum that extends to far more extreme types in both
      directions, while in between there are users who mix both types in
      different proportions [Res_p2p].

   But the scenario has merely been chosen because it makes it simple to
   grasp the main issues while still retaining some similarity to the
   real Internet.  We will also develop the scenario as we go, to add
   more realism (e.g. adding mixed user types).

A.2.  Compounding Overlooked Degrees of Freedom

   Table 3 extends the base scenario of Appendix A to compound
   differences in average activity factor with differences in average
   numbers of active flows.

   During the 'day' at any instant we assume on average that attended
   use results in 2 flows per user (which are still only open 10% of the
   time), while unattended use results in 100 flows per user open
   continuously.  So at any one time 2016 flows are active, 16 from



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   attended use (10%*80=8 users at any one time * 2 flows) and 2000 from
   unattended use (20 users * 100 flows).  TCP will ensure each of the 8
   users who are active at any one time gets about 2*10Mbps/2016 =
   9.9kbps of the bottleneck, while each of the 20 unattended users gets
   about 100*10Mbps/2016 = 496kbps.  This ignores flow start up effects,
   which will tend to make matters even worse for attended use, given
   briefer flows start more often.

   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+
   |    Type of |   No. | Activ- |           Ave | Day rate |      Day |
   |        use |    of |    ity |  simultaneous |    /user |   volume |
   |            | users | factor |   flows /user |   (16hr) |    /user |
   |            |       |        |               |          |   (16hr) |
   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+
   |   Attended |    80 |    10% |             2 |  9.9kbps |    7.1MB |
   | Unattended |    20 |   100% |           100 |  496kbps |    3.6GB |
   |            |       |        |               |          |          |
   |  Aggregate |   100 |        |          2016 |   10Mbps |     72GB |
   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+

     Table 3: Compounded scenario with attentive users less frequently
   active and running less flows than unattentive users,  assuming 100%
           utilisation of 10Mbps bottleneck and all equal RTTs.

A.3.  Hybrid Users

   {ToDo:}

A.4.  Upgrading Makes Most Users Worse Off

   Now that the light users are only getting 9.9kbps from their 2Mbps
   lines, the operator needs to consider upgrading their bottleneck (and
   all the other access bottlenecks for its other customers), so it does
   a market survey.  The operator finds that fifty of the eighty light
   users and ten of the twenty heavy users are willing to pay more to
   get an extra 500kbps each at the bottleneck.  (Note that by making a
   smaller proportion of the heavy users willing to pay more we haven't
   weighted the argument in our favour--in fact our argument would have
   been even stronger the other way round.)

   To satisfy the sixty users who are willing to pay for a 500kbps
   upgrade will require a 60*500kbps = 30Mbps upgrade to the bottleneck
   and proportionate upgrades deeper into the network, which will cost
   the ISP an extra $120 per month (say).  The outcome is shown in
   Table 4.  Because the bottleneck has grown from 10Mbps to 40Mbps, the
   bit rates in the whole scenario essentially scale up by 4x.  However,
   also notice that the total volume sent by the light users has not
   grown by 4x.  Although they can send at 4x the bit rate, which means



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   they get more done and therefore transfer more volume, they don't
   have 4x more volume to transfer--they let their machines idle for
   longer between transfers reflected in their activity factor having
   reduced from 10% to 4%.  More bit rate was what they wanted, not more
   volume particularly.

   Let's assume the operator increases the monthly fee of all 100
   customers by $1.20 to pay for the $120 upgrade.  The light users had
   a 9.9kbps share of the bottleneck.  They've all paid their share of
   the upgrade, but they've only got 30kbps more than they had--nothing
   like the 500kbps upgrade most of them wanted and thought they were
   paying for.  TCP has caused each heavy user to increase the bit rate
   of its flows by 4x too, and each has 50x more flows for 25x more of
   the time, so they use up most of the newly provisioned capacity even
   though only half of them were willing to pay for it.

   But the operator knew from its marketing that 30 of the light users
   and 10 of the heavy ones didn't want to pay any more anyway.  Over
   time, the extra $1.20/month is likely to make them drift away to a
   competitor who runs a similar network but who decided not to upgrade
   its 10Mbps bottlenecks.  Then the cost of the upgrade on our example
   network will have to be shared over 60 not 100 customers, requiring
   each to pay $2/month extra, rather than $1.20.

   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+
   |    Type of |   No. | Activ- |           Ave | Day rate |      Day |
   |        use |    of |    ity |  simultaneous |    /user |   volume |
   |            | users | factor |   flows /user |   (16hr) |    /user |
   |            |       |        |               |          |   (16hr) |
   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+
   |   Attended |    80 |     4% |             2 |   40kbps |     11MB |
   | Unattended |    20 |   100% |           100 |  2.0Mbps |     14GB |
   |            |       |        |               |          |          |
   |  Aggregate |   100 |        |        2006.4 |   40Mbps |    288GB |
   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+

    Table 4: Scenario with bottleneck upgraded to 40Mbps, but otherwise
                    unchanged from compounded scenario.

   But perhaps losing a greater proportion of the heavy users will help?
   Table 5 shows the resulting shares of the bottleneck once all the
   cost sensitive customers have drifted away.  Bit rates have increased
   by another 2x, mainly because there are 2x fewer heavy users.  But
   that still only gives the light users 80kbps when they wanted
   500kbps--and, to rub salt in their wounds, their monthly fees have
   increased by $2 in all.  The remaining 10 heavy users are probably
   happy enough though.  For the extra $2/month they get to transfer 8x
   more volume each (and they still have the night to themselves).



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   We have shown how the operator might lose those customers who didn't
   want to pay.  But it also risks losing all fifty of those valuable
   light customers who were willing to pay, and who did pay, but who
   hardly got any benefit.  In this situation, a rational operator will
   eventually have no choice but to stop investing in capacity,
   otherwise it will only be left with ten customers.

   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+
   |    Type of |   No. | Activ- |           Ave | Day rate |      Day |
   |        use |    of |    ity |  simultaneous |    /user |   volume |
   |            | users | factor |   flows /user |   (16hr) |    /user |
   |            |       |        |               |          |   (16hr) |
   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+
   |   Attended |    50 |   2.5% |             2 |   80kbps |     14MB |
   | Unattended |    10 |   100% |           100 |  4.0Mbps |     29GB |
   |            |       |        |               |          |          |
   |  Aggregate |    60 |        |        1002.5 |   40Mbps |    288GB |
   +------------+-------+--------+---------------+----------+----------+

   Table 5: Scenario with bottleneck upgraded to 40Mbps, but having lost
     customers due to extra cost; otherwise unchanged from compounded
                                 scenario.

   We hope the above examples have clearly illustrated two main points:

   o  Rate equality at design time doesn't prevent extreme unfairness at
      run time;

   o  If extreme unfairness is not corrected, capacity investment tends
      to stop--a concrete consequence of unfairness that affects
      everyone.

   Finally, note that configuration guidelines for typical p2p
   applications (e.g.  BitTorrent calculator [az-calc]), advise a
   maximum number of open connections that increases roughly linearly
   with upstream capacity.















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Authors' Addresses

   Bob Briscoe
   BT & UCL
   B54/77, Adastral Park
   Martlesham Heath
   Ipswich  IP5 3RE
   UK

   Phone: +44 1473 645196
   Email: bob.briscoe@bt.com
   URI:   http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/B.Briscoe/


   Toby Moncaster
   BT
   B54/70, Adastral Park
   Martlesham Heath, Ipswich  IP5 3RE
   UK

   Phone: +44 1473 645196
   Email: toby.moncaster@bt.com
   URI:   http://research.bt.com/networks/TobyMoncaster.html


   Louise Burness
   BT
   B54/77, Adastral Park
   Martlesham Heath
   Ipswich  IP5 3RE
   UK

   Phone: +44 1473 646504
   Email: Louise.Burness@bt.com
   URI:   http://research.bt.com/networks/LouiseBurness.html
















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Full Copyright Statement

   Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).

   This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions
   contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors
   retain all their rights.

   This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
   "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS
   OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY, THE IETF TRUST AND
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Acknowledgments

   Funding for the RFC Editor function is provided by the IETF
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   using xml2rfc v1.32 (of http://xml.resource.org/) from a source in
   RFC-2629 XML format.



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