Internet Engineering Task Force S. Floyd, Editor
INTERNET-DRAFT ICIR
Intended status: Experimental A. Arcia
Expires: 13 October 2007 D. Ros
ENST Bretagne
J. Iyengar
Connecticut College
13 April 2007
Adding Acknowledgement Congestion Control to TCP
draft-floyd-tcpm-ackcc-00.txt
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Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
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Abstract
This document adds an optional congestion control mechanism for
acknowledgement traffic (ACKs) to TCP. The document specifies an
end-to-end acknowledgement congestion control mechanism for TCP that
uses participation from both TCP hosts, the TCP data sender and the
TCP data receiver. The TCP data sender detects lost and ECN-marked
ACK packets, and tells the TCP data receiver the ACK Ratio R to use
to respond to the congestion on the reverse path from the data
receiver to the data sender. The TCP data receiver sends roughly one
ACK packet for every R data packets received. This mechanism is
based on the acknowledgement congestion control in DCCP's CCID 2
[RFC4340], [RFC4341]. This acknowledgement congestion control
mechanism is being proposed as an experimental mechanism for TCP for
evaluation by the network community.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................4
2. Conventions .....................................................4
3. Overview ........................................................5
4. Related Work ....................................................5
5. Acknowledgement Congestion Control ..............................7
5.1. Negotiating the Use of ACK Congestion Control ..............7
5.2. The TCP ACK Ratio Option ...................................8
5.3. Implementing the ACK Ratio .................................8
5.4. Determining Lost or Marked ACK Packets .....................9
5.5. Adjusting the ACK Ratio ...................................10
5.6. Sending ACKs for Out-of-Order Data Segments ...............10
5.7. The Sender's Response to ACK Packets ......................11
6. Possible Complications .........................................12
6.1. Possible Complications: Delayed Acknowledgements .........12
6.2. Possible Complications: Duplicate Acknowledgements. .......12
6.3. Possible Complications: Two-Way Traffic. .................13
6.4. Possible Complications: Reordering of ACK Packets. .......13
6.5. Possible Complications: Abrupt changes in the ACK path. ...13
6.6. Possible Complications: Corruption. .......................13
6.7. Other Issues ..............................................13
7. Acknowledgement Congestion Control in CCID 2 ...................14
8. Security Considerations ........................................14
9. IANA Considerations ............................................15
10. Conclusions ...................................................15
11. Acknowledgements ..............................................15
Normative References ..............................................15
Informative References ............................................16
Full Copyright Statement ..........................................17
Intellectual Property .............................................18
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1. Introduction
This documents adds an optional congestion control mechanism to TCP
for acknowledgements (ACKs). This mechanism is based on the
acknowledgement congestion control in DCCP's CCID 2 [RFC4340],
[RFC4341].
In this document we use the termininology of senders and receivers,
with the sender sending data traffic, and the receiver sending
acknowledgement traffic in response. In CCID 2's acknowledgement
congestion control, specified in Section 6.1 of [RFC4341], the
receiver maintains an ACK Ratio R, sending roughly one ACK packet for
every R data packets received. The CCID 2 sender keeps the
acknowledgement rate roughly TCP friendly by monitoring the
acknowledgement stream for lost and marked ACK packets and modifying
the ACK Ratio accordingly. For every RTT containing an ACK
congestion event (that is, a lost or marked ACK packet), the sender
halves the acknowledgement rate by doubling the ACK Ratio; for every
RTT containing no ACK congestion event, the sender additively
increases the acknowledgement rate through gradual decreases in the
ACK Ratio.
Adding a similar acknowledgement congestion control as an option in
TCP requires the following:
* An agreement from the TCP hosts on the use of ACK congestion
control. The TCP hosts use a new TCP option, the ACK-Congestion-
Control-Permitted Option.
* A mechanism for the TCP sender to detect lost and ECN-marked pure
acknowledgement packets.
* A mechanism for adjusting the ACK Ratio. The TCP sender adjusts
the ACK Ratio as specified in Section 6.1.2 of [RFC4341].
* A method for the TCP sender to inform the TCP receiver of a new
value for the ACK Ratio. The TCP sender uses a new TCP option, the
ACK Ratio Option.
2. Conventions
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].
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3. Overview
This section gives a non-normative overview of acknowledgement
congestion control for TCP.
[Graphics will be added.]
During connection initiation, TCP host B sends an ACK-Congestion-
Control-Permitted option on its SYN or SYN/ACK packet. This allows
TCP host A (now called the sender) to send instructions to TCP host B
(now called the receiver) about the Ack Ratio to use in responding to
data packets.
Also during connection initiation, TCP host A sends an ACK-
Congestion-Control-Permitted option on its SYN or SYN/ACK packet. In
combination with TCP host B's sending of an ACK-Congestion-Control-
Permitted option, this allows TCP host B to send its ACK packets as
ECN-Capable.
The TCP receiver starts with an ACK Ratio of two, generally sending
one ACK packet for every two data packets received.
The TCP sender detects lost or ECN-marked ACK packets from the TCP
receiver, and at some point sends an ACK Ratio option of three to the
receiver. The TCP receiver changes to an ACK Ratio of three,
generally sending one ACK packet for every three data packets. The
TCP sender uses Appropriate Byte Counting and rate-based pacing in
responding to these ACK packets.
The TCP sender detects fewer lost ACK packets, and at some point
sends an ACK Ratio option of two to the TCP receiver. The TCP
receiver changes back to an ACK Ratio of two, generally sending one
ACK packet for every two data packets.
4. Related Work
The goal of the mechanism proposed in this document is to control
pure ACK traffic on the path from the TCP data receiver to the TCP
data sender. Note that the approach outlined here is an end-to-end
one (as is the approach followed by DCCP's CCID 2 [RFC4341]), but it
may also take advantage of explicit congestion information from the
network conveyed by ECN [RFC3168], if available. The ECN
specification [RFC3168, section 6.1.4] prohibits a TCP receiver from
setting the ECT(0) or ECT(1) codepoints in IP packets carrying pure
ACKs, but *only* as long as the receiver does *not* implement any
form of ACK congestion control.
There exist several papers dealing with controlling congestion in the
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reverse path of a TCP connection, especially in the context of
networks with bandwidth asymmetry. Some of these proposals require
explicit support from routers or middleboxes, whereas others are
"pure" end-to-end schemes.
Balakrishnan et al. ([BPK97]) describe the use of ECN to detect
congestion in the return path, in order to reduce the sending rate of
ACKs. The use of a RED queue in the reverse path allows for marking
of ACK packets. The sender echoes back ECN congestion marks to the
receiver. The receiver keeps an ACK ratio d (called the "delayed-ACK
factor"), specifying the number of data segments that have to be
received before the receiver sends a new ACK. The ACK ratio d is
managed using multiplicative-increase, additive-decrease; upon
reception of a congestion mark, the receiver doubles the value of d
(hence dividing the ACK sending rate by two). The ACK ratio
decreases linearly for each RTT in which no ECN-marked ACKs are
received. Multiple congestion marks received in an RTT are treated
as a single congestion event, i.e., d can be doubled at most once per
RTT. The TCP timestamp option is used to keep track of the RTT
values.
In [TJW00], Tam Ming-Chit et al. propose a receiver-based method for
calculating an "appropriate" number of ACKs per congestion window
(cwnd) of data, in order to alleviate congestion on the reverse path.
The sender's cwnd is estimated at the receiver by counting the number
of received packets per RTT (which also has to be estimated by the
receiver). From this estimate, a simple algorithm is used to compute
the number of ACKs to be sent per cwnd. The algorithm enforces a
lower bound on the number of ACKs per cwnd, aiming at minimizing the
probability of timeout at the sender due to ACK loss. Similarly, the
ACK ratio is upper-bounded so as to avoid excessive ACK delay.
ACK filtering (AF) [BPK97] from Balakrishnan et al. is a router-based
technique that tries to reduce the number of ACKs sent over the
congested return link. With AF, an arriving ACK may replace
preceding, older ACKs at the bottleneck queue. An aggressive
replacement policy might guarantee that at most one ACK per
connection is waiting in the queue, alleviating congestion. However,
as in other proposals, care must be taken to avoid sender timeouts in
case the (too few) ACKs resulting from the filtering get lost. The
idea of filtering ACKs has been extended in [YMH03] to deal with SACK
information.
Blandford et al. [BGG+07] propose an end-to-end, receiver-oriented
scheme called "smartacking". The algorithm is based upon the
receiver monitoring the inter-segment arrival time for data packets
and adapting the ACK sending rate in response. When the bottleneck
link is underutilized, ACKs are sent frequently (up to one ACK per
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received segment) to promote fast growth of the congestion window.
On the other hand, when the bottleneck is close to full utilization,
the algorithm tries to reduce control traffic overhead and slow
congestion window growth by generating ACKs at the minimum rate
needed to keep the data pipe full.
Reducing the number of ACKs (or, equivalently, increasing the amount
of bytes acknowledged by each ACK) can increase the burstiness of the
TCP sender. Hence, any mechanism as those cited above should be
coupled with some burst mitigation technique [AB05]. Such a
technique may consist in either limiting the size of the bursts or
pacing the sending of data segments [ASA00], or a combination of both
like the Sender Adaptation proposal in [BPK97].
Aweya et al. [AOM02] present a middlebox-based approach for
mitigating data packet bursts and for controlling the uplink ACK
congestion. The main idea is to perform pacing on ACK segments on an
edge device close to the sender, so as to control the ACK arrival
rate at the sender.
Unlike some of the related work cited above, in this document we are
proposing an end-to-end ACK congestion control mechanism that
controls congestion on the reverse path (the path followed by the ACK
traffic) by detecting and responding to marked or dropped ACK
packets.
5. Acknowledgement Congestion Control
5.1. Negotiating the Use of ACK Congestion Control
The TCP end-points negotiate the use of ACK Congestion Control
(ACKCC) with a TCP option, the ACK-Congestion-Control-Permitted
Option. The option number will be allocated by IANA.
The ACK-Congestion-Control-Permitted option can only be sent on
packets that have the SYN bit set. If TCP end-point A receives an
ACK-Congestion-Control-Permitted option from TCP end-point B, then
the TCP end-points MAY use ACK Congestion Control on the pure
acknowledgements sent from B to A. This means that TCP end-point A
MAY send ACK Ratio values to TCP end-point B, for TCP end-point B to
use on pure acknowledgement packets.
Similarly, if TCP end-point B receives an ACK-Congestion-Control-
Permitted option from TCP end-point A, then the TCP end-points MAY
use ACK Congestion Control on the pure acknowledgements sent from A
to B.
If TCP end-point B receives an ACK-Congestion-Control-Permitted
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option from TCP end-point A and also sent an ACK-Congestion-Control-
Permitted option to TCP end-point A, then TCP end-point B can send
its ACK packets as ECN-Capable.
TCP ACK-Congestion-Control-Permitted Option:
Kind: N
+-----------+-----------+
| Kind=N | Length=2 |
+-----------+-----------+
When ACK Congestion Control is used, the default initial ACK Ratio is
two, with the receiver acknowledging at least every other data
packet.
5.2. The TCP ACK Ratio Option
The sender uses a ACK Ratio TCP Option to communicate the ACK Ratio
value from the sender to the receiver.
TCP ACK Ratio Option:
Kind: N+1
+-----------+-----------+-----------+
| Kind=N+1 | Length=3 | ACK Ratio |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+
The ACK Ratio Option is only sent on data packets. Because TCP uses
reliable delivery for data packets, the TCP sender can tell if the
TCP receiver has received an ACK Ratio Option.
5.3. Implementing the ACK Ratio
With an ACK Ratio of R, the receiver should send one pure ACK for
every R newly received data packets unless the delayed ACK timer
expires first. A receiver could simply maintain a counter that
increments up to R for each new data packet received, and then reset
the counter to zero when an ACK is sent, either pure or piggybacked.
[RFC2581] recommends that the receiver SHOULD acknowledge out-of-
order data packets immediately, sending an immediate duplicate ACK
when it receives a data segment above a gap in the sequence space,
and sending an immediate ACK when it receives a data segment that
fills in all or part of a gap in the sequence space.
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When ACK Congestion Control is being used and the ACK Ratio is at
most two, the TCP receiver MUST acknowledge each out-of-order data
packet immediately. For an ACK Ratio greater than two, Section 5.6
specifies in detail the receiver's behavior for sending ACKs for out-
of-order data packets.
5.4. Determining Lost or Marked ACK Packets
The TCP data sender uses its knowledge of the ACK Ratio in use by the
receiver to infer when an ACK packet has been lost.
Because the TCP sender knows the ACK Ratio R in use by the receiver,
the TCP sender knows that in the absence of dropped or reordered
acknowledgement packets, each new acknowledgement received will
acknowledge at most R additional data packets. Thus, if the sender
receives an acknowledgement acknowledging more than R data packets,
and does not receive a subsequent acknowledgement acknowledging a
strict subset (with a smaller cumulative acknowledgement, or with the
same cumulative acknowledgement but a strict subset of data
acknowledged in SACK blocks), then the sender can infer that an ACK
packet has been dropped.
Similarly, the TCP sender knows that in the absence of dropped or
delayed data packets from the sender, and in the absence of delayed
acknowledgements due to a timer expiring at the receiver, each new
pure acknowledgement received will acknowledge at least R additional
data packets. In terms of ACK congestion control, the TCP sender
does not have to take any actions when it receives an acknowledgement
acknowledging less than R additional packets.
If the ACK Ratio is at most two, then the TCP receiver sends a dupACK
for every out-of-order data packet. In this case, the TCP sender can
detect lost DupACK packets by counting the number of DupACKs that
arrived between the beginning of the loss event and the arrival of
the first full or partial ACK, and comparing this number with the
number of DupACKs that should have arrived (based on the number of
packets being ACKed by the full or partial ACK).
If the ACK Ratio is greater than two, the TCP receiver does not send
a dupACK for every out-of-order data packet, as specified in Section
5.6. For simplicity, if the ACK Ratio is greater than two, the TCP
sender does not attempt to detect lost ACK packets during loss events
involving forward-path data traffic. That is, as soon as the sender
infers a packet loss for a forward-path data packet, it stops
detection of ACK loss on the reverse path. The sender waits until a
new cumulative acknowledgement is received that covers the
retransmitted data, and then restarts detection of ACK loss for
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reverse-path traffic.
5.5. Adjusting the ACK Ratio
The TCP sender will adjust the ACK Ratio as specified in Section
6.1.2 of [RFC4341], as follows.
The ACK Ratio always meets three constraints: (1) the ACK Ratio is an
integer. (2) the ACK Ratio does not exceed cwnd/(2*MSS), rounded up,
except that ACK Ratio 2 is always acceptable. (3) the ACK Ratio is
two or more for a congestion window of four or more full-sized
segments.
The sender changes the ACK Ratio within those constraints as follows.
For each congestion window of data with lost or marked ACK packets,
the ACK Ratio R is doubled; and for each cwnd/(MSS*(R^2 - R))
consecutive congestion windows of data with no lost or marked ACK
packets, the ACK Ratio is decreased by 1. (See Appendix A of RFC
4341 for the derivation. Note that Appendix A of RFC 4341 assumes a
congestion window W in packets, while we use cwnd in bytes.)
For a constant congestion window, this gives an ACK sending rate that
is roughly TCP friendly. Of course, cwnd usually varies over time;
the dynamics will be rather complex, but roughly TCP friendly. We
recommend that the sender use the most recent value of cwnd when
determining whether to decrease ACK Ratio by one.
The sender need not keep the ACK Ratio completely up to date. For
instance, it MAY rate-limit ACK Ratio renegotiations to once every
four or five round-trip times, or to once every second or two. The
sender SHOULD NOT attempt to change the ACK Ratio more than once per
round-trip time. Additionally, it MAY enforce a minimum ACK Ratio of
two, or it MAY set ACK Ratio to one for half-connections with
persistent congestion windows of 1 or 2 packets.
With ACK congestion control, the receiver could be sending two ACK
packets per window of data even in the face of very heavy congestion
on the reverse path. We would note, however, that if congestion is
sufficiently heavy, all the ack packets are dropped, and then the
sender falls back on an exponentially backed-off timeout. Thus, if
congestion is sufficiently heavy on the reverse path, then the sender
reduces its sending rate on the forward path, which reduces the rate
on the reverse path as well.
5.6. Sending ACKs for Out-of-Order Data Segments
RFC 2581 says that "a TCP receiver SHOULD send an immediate duplicate
ACK when an out-of-order segment arrives." After three duplicate
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ACKs are received, the TCP sender infers a packet loss and implements
Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery, retransmitting the missing packet.
When the ACK Ratio is at most two, the TCP receiver SHOULD still send
an immediate duplicate ACK when an out-of-order segment arrives.
When the ACK Ratio is greater than two, the TCP receiver still SHOULD
send an immediate duplicate ACK for each of the first three out-of-
order segments that arrive in a reordering event. (We define a
reordering event at the receiver as beginning when an out-of-order
segment arrives, and ending when the receiver holds no more out-of-
order segments.) However, when the ACK Ratio is greater than two,
after the first three duplicate ACKs have been sent, the TCP receiver
should perform ACK congestion control on the remaining ACKs to be
sent during the current reordering event. That is, after the first
three duplicate ACKs have been sent, the TCP receiver SHOULD send an
ACK for every R out-of-order segments, instead of sending an ACK for
every out-of-order segment. In addition, a receiver MUST NOT
withhold an ACK for more than 500 ms.
5.7. The Sender's Response to ACK Packets
The use of a large ACK Ratio can generate line rate data bursts at a
TCP sender. When the ACK Ratio is greater than two, the TCP sender
SHOULD use some form of burst mitigation, or rate-based pacing for
sending data packets in response to a single acknowledgement. The
use of rate-based pacing will be limited by the timer granularity at
the TCP sender.
We note that the interaction of ACK congestion control and burst
mitigation schemes needs further study.
In addition to the impact of a large ACK Ratio on the burstiness of
the TCP sender's sending rate, a large ACK Ratio can also affect the
data sending rate by slowing down the increase of the congestion
window cwnd. As specified in RFC 2581, in slow-start the TCP sender
increases cwnd by one full-sized segment for each new ACK received
(in this context, a "new ACK" is an ACK that acknowledges new data).
RFC 2581 also specifies that in congestion avoidance, the TCP sender
increases cwnd by roughly 1/cwnd full-sized segments for each ACK
received, resulting in an increase in cwnd of roughly one full-sized
segment per round-trip time. In this case, the use of a large ACK
Ratio would slow down the increase of the sender's congestion window.
RFC 2581 notes that it is also acceptable to count the number of
bytes acknowledged by new ACKs, and to increase cwnd based on the
number of bytes acknowledged, rather than on the number of new ACKs
received. Thus, the sender SHOULD use Appropriate Byte Counting
[RFC3465] with Acknowledgement Congestion Control, so that the
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Acknowledgement Congestion Control doesn't slow down the window
increases for the data traffic sent by the sender.
As cited earlier, RFC 2581 infers that a packet has been lost after
it receives three duplicate acknowledgements. Because ACK Congestion
Control is only used when there is congestion on the reverse path,
after a packet loss one or more of the three duplicate ACKs sent by
the receiver could be lost on the reverse path, and the receiver
might wait until it has received R more out-of-order segments before
sending the next duplicate ACK. All this could slow down Fast
Recovery and Fast Retransmit quite a bit. To reduce the potential
delay in detecting a lost packet, we add that when SACK is used, a
TCP sender SHOULD use the information in the SACK option to detect
when the receiver has received at least three out-of-order data
packets, and to initiate Fast Retransmit and Fast Recovery in this
case, even if the TCP sender has not yet received three dup ACKs.
6. Possible Complications
6.1. Possible Complications: Delayed Acknowledgements
The receiver could send a delayed acknowledgement acknowledging a
single packet, even when the ACK Ratio is two or more.
This should not cause false positives (when the TCP sender infers a
loss when no loss happened). The TCP sender only infers that a pure
ACK packet has been lost when no data packet has been lost, and an
ACK packet arrives acknowledging more than R new packets.
Delayed acknowledgements could, however, cause false negatives, with
the TCP sender unable to detect the loss of an ack packet sent as a
delayed acknowedgement. False negatives seem acceptable; this would
result in approximate ACK congestion control, which would be better
than no ACK congestion control at all. In particular, when this form
of false negative occurs, it is because the receiver is sending
acknowledgements at such a low rate that it is sending delayed
acknowledgements, rather than acknowledging at least R data packets
with each acknowledgement.
6.2. Possible Complications: Duplicate Acknowledgements.
As discussed in Section 5.3, RFC 2581 states that "a TCP receiver
SHOULD send an immediate duplicate ACK when an out-of-order segment
arrives," and that "a TCP receiver SHOULD send an immediate ACK when
the incoming segment fills in all or part of a gap in the sequence
space" [RFC2581]. When ACK Congestion Control is used, the TCP
receiver instead uses the guidelines from Section 5.6 to govern the
sending of duplicate ACKs. More work would be useful to evaluate the
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advantages and disadvantages of this approach in terms of the
potential delay in triggering Fast Retransmit, and to explore
alternate possibilities.
6.3. Possible Complications: Two-Way Traffic.
In a TCP connection with two-way traffic, the receiver could send
some pure ACK packets, and some acknowledgements piggy-backed on data
packets. In this case, how well can the TCP sender infer when pure
ACK packets have been lost? The receiver would still follow the rule
of only sending a pure ACK packet when there is a need for a delayed
ack, or there are R new data packets to acknowledge.
6.4. Possible Complications: Reordering of ACK Packets.
It is possible for ACK packets to be reordered on the reverse path.
The TCP sender could either use a parallel mechanism to the dupACK
threshold to infer when an ACK packet has been lost, as with TCP, or,
more robustly, the TCP sender could wait an entire round-trip time
before inferring that an ACK packet has been lost [RFC4653].
6.5. Possible Complications: Abrupt changes in the ACK path.
What happens when there are abrupt changes in the reverse path, such
as from vertical handovers? Can there be any problems that would be
worse than those experienced by a TCP connection that is not using
ACK congestion control?
6.6. Possible Complications: Corruption.
As with data packets, it is possible for ACK packets to be dropped in
the network due to corruption rather than congestion. The current
assumption of ACK congestion control is that all losses should be
taken as indications of congestion. When there is some better answer
for corrupted TCP data packets, the same solution hopefully would
apply to corrupted ACK packets as well.
6.7. Other Issues
Are there any problems caused by the combination of two-way traffic
and reordering?
How well would ACK congestion control work without SACK information?
Or would SACK be required with ACK congestion control?
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7. Acknowledgement Congestion Control in CCID 2
Rate-based pacing: For CCID 2, RFC 4341 says that "senders MAY use a
form of rate-based pacing when sending multiple data packets
liberated by a single ACK packet, rather than sending all liberated
data packets in a single burst." However, rate-based pacing is not
required in CCID 2.
Increasing the congestion window: For CCID 2, RFC 4341 says that
"when cwnd < ssthresh, meaning that the sender is in slow-start, the
congestion window is increased by one packet for every two newly
acknowledged data packets with ACK Vector State 0 (not ECN-marked),
up to a maximum of ACK Ratio/2 packets per acknowledgement. This is
a modified form of Appropriate Byte Counting [RFC3465] that is
consistent with TCP's current standard (which does not include byte
counting), but allows CCID 2 to increase as aggressively as TCP when
CCID 2's ACK Ratio is greater than the default value of two. When
cwnd >= ssthresh, the congestion window is increased by one packet
for every window of data acknowledged without lost or marked
packets."
8. Security Considerations
[To be finished later.]
What are the sender's incentives to cheat on ACK congestion control?
What are the receiver's incentives to cheat? What are the avenues
open for cheating?
As long as ACK congestion control is optional, neither host can be
forced to use ACK congestion control if it doesn't want to. So ACK
congestion control will only be used if the sender or receiver have
some chance of receiving some benefit.
As long as ACK congestion control is optional for TCP, there is
little incentive for the TCP end nodes to cheat on non-ECN-based ACK
congestion control. There is nothing now that requires TCP hosts to
use congestion control in response to dropped ACK packets.
What avenues for cheating are opened by the use of ECN-Capable ACK
packets? If the end nodes can use ECN to have ACK packets marked
rather than dropped, and if the end nodes can then avoid the use of
ACK congestion control that goes along with the use of ECN on ACK
packets, then the end nodes could have an incentive to cheat.
Senders could cheat by not instructing the receiver to use a higher
ACK Ratio; the receiver would have a hard time detecting this
cheating. Receivers could cheat by not using the ACK Ratio they were
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instructed to use, but senders could easily detect this cheating.
However, receivers could also cheat by not using ACK congestion
control and still sending ACK packets as ECN-capable, so ACK
congestion control is not a necessary component for receivers to
cheat about sending ECN-capable ACK packets. One question would be
whether there is any way for receivers to cheat about sending ECN-
Capable ACK packets and not using appropriate ACK congestion control
without this cheating being easily detected by the sender.
What about the ability of routers or middleboxes to detect TCP
receivers that cheat by inappropriately sending ACK packets as ECN-
capable? The router will only know if the receiver is authorized to
send ACK packets as ECN-Capable if it monitored both the SYN and
SYN/ACK packets (and was able to read the TCP options in the packet
headers). If ACK congestion control has been negotiated, the router
will only know if ACK congestion control is being used correctly by
the receiver if it can monitor the ACK Ratio options sent from the
sender to the receiver. If ACK congestion control is being used, the
router will not necessarily be able to tell if ACK congestion control
is being used correctly by the sender, because drops of ACK packets
might be occurring after the ACK packets have left the router.
However, if the router sees the ACK Ratio options sent from the
sender, the router will be able to tell if the sender is correctly
accounting for those ACK packets that are dropped or ECN-marked on
the path from the receiver to the router.
9. IANA Considerations
IANA will allocate the option numbers for the two TCP options, the
ACK-Congestion-Control-Permitted Option, and the ACK Ratio Option.
10. Conclusions
11. Acknowledgements
Many thanks for feedback and contributed text from Michael Welzl.
Normative References
[RFC2119] S. Bradner, Key Words For Use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels, RFC 2119.
[RFC2581] Allman, M., V. Paxson, and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion
Control", RFC 2581, April 1999.
[RFC3465] Allman, M., TCP Congestion Control with Appropriate
Byte Counting (ABC), RFC 3465, Experimental, February
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INTERNET-DRAFT TCPM - ACK CONGESTION CONTROL April 2007
2003.
[RFC4340] Kohler, E., Handley, M., and S. Floyd, "Datagram
Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)", RFC 4340, March
2006.
[RFC4341] Floyd, S., and E. Kohler, Profile for Datagram
Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) Congestion Control
ID 2: TCP-like Congestion Control, RFC 4341, March
2006.
Informative References
[RFC3168] K. Ramakrishnan, S. Floyd and D. Black. The Addition
of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP. RFC
3168, September 2001.
[RFC4653] S. Bhandarkar, A. L. N. Reddy, M. Allman and E.
Blanton, Improving the Robustness of TCP to Non-
Congestion Events, RFC 4653, August 2006.
[ASA00] A. Aggarwal, S. Savage, and T. Anderson. Understanding
the Performance of TCP Pacing. In INFOCOM (3), pages
11571165, 2000.
[AB05] M. Allman and E. Blanton. Notes on Burst Mitigation
for Transport Protocols. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev.,
35(2):5360, 2005.
[AOM02] J. Aweya, M. Ouellette, and D. Y. Montuno. A Self-
regulating TCP Acknowledgement (ack) Pacing Scheme.
Int. J. Netw. Manag., 12(3):145163, 2002.
[BPK97] Balakrishnan, H., V. Padmanabhan, and Katz, R., The
Effects of Asymmetry on TCP Performance, Third
ACM/IEEE Mobicom Conference, September 1997.
[BGG+07] D.K. Blandford, S.A. Goldman, S. Gorinsky, Y. Zhou,
and D.R. Dooly. Smartacking: Improving TCP
Performance from the Receiving End. Journal of
Internet Engineering, 1(1), 2007.
[TJW00] I. Tam Ming-Chit, D. Jinsong and W. Wang. Improving
TCP Performance Over Asymmetric Networks. ACM SIGCOMM
Computer Communication Review, 30(3), July 2000.
[YMH03] L. Yu, Y. Minhua, and Z. Huimin. The Improvement of
TCP Performance in Bandwidth Asymmetric Network. IEEE
Floyd [Page 16]
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PIMRC, 1:482-486, September 2003.
Authors' Addresses
Sally Floyd
ICSI Center for Internet Research
1947 Center Street, Suite 600
Berkeley, CA 94704
USA
EMail: floyd <at> icir <dot> org
Andres Arcia
Networking, Security & Multimedia (RSM) Dpt.
GET / ENST Bretagne
Rue de la Chataigneraie, CS 17607
35576 Cesson Sevigne Cedex
France
Email: AE <dot> ARCIA <at> enst-bretagne <dot> fr
Janardhan R. Iyengar
Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Avenue
New London, CT 06320
USA
Email: iyengar <at> conncoll <dot> edu
David Ros
Networking, Security & Multimedia (RSM) Dpt.
GET / ENST Bretagne
Rue de la Chataigneraie, CS 17607
35576 Cesson Sevigne Cedex
France
Email: David <dot> Ros <at> enst-bretagne <dot> fr
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.
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This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
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