AQM working group                                 T. Hoeiland-Joergensen
Internet-Draft                                       Karlstad University
Intended status: Informational                               P. McKenney
Expires: January 5, 2016                     IBM Linux Technology Center
                                                                 D. Taht
                                                                Teklibre
                                                               J. Gettys

                                                              E. Dumazet
                                                            Google, Inc.
                                                           July 04, 2015


                            FlowQueue-Codel
                       draft-ietf-aqm-fq-codel-01

Abstract

   This memo presents the FQ-CoDel hybrid packet scheduler/AQM
   algorithm, a powerful tool for fighting bufferbloat and reducing
   latency.

   FQ-CoDel mixes packets from multiple flows and reduces the impact of
   head of line blocking from bursty traffic.  It provides isolation for
   low-rate traffic such as DNS, web, and videoconferencing traffic.  It
   improves utilisation across the networking fabric, especially for
   bidirectional traffic, by keeping queue lengths short; and it can be
   implemented in a memory- and CPU-efficient fashion across a wide
   range of hardware.

Status of This Memo

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

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on January 5, 2016.





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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
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   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.1.  Terminology and concepts  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.2.  Informal summary of FQ-CoDel  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   2.  CoDel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   3.  Flow Queueing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  FQ-CoDel Parameters and Data Structures . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     4.1.  Parameters  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
       4.1.1.  Interval  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
       4.1.2.  Target  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       4.1.3.  Packet limit  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       4.1.4.  Quantum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
       4.1.5.  Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       4.1.6.  ECN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       4.1.7.  CE_THRESHOLD  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     4.2.  Data structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       4.2.1.  Internal queues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
       4.2.2.  New and old queues lists  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   5.  The FQ-CoDel scheduler  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     5.1.  Enqueue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       5.1.1.  Alternative classification schemes  . . . . . . . . .  10
     5.2.  Dequeue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   6.  Implementation considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     6.1.  Probability of hash collisions  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     6.2.  Memory Overhead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     6.3.  Per-Packet Timestamping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     6.4.  Other forms of "Fair Queueing"  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     6.5.  Differences between CoDel and FQ-CoDel behaviour  . . . .  13
   7.  Limitations of flow queueing  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
     7.1.  Fairness between things other than flows  . . . . . . . .  14
     7.2.  Flow bunching by opaque encapsulation . . . . . . . . . .  15
     7.3.  Low-priority congestion control algorithms  . . . . . . .  15



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   8.  Deployment status and future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   9.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  16
   11. Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   12. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
   13. References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
     13.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
     13.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
     13.3.  URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18

1.  Introduction

   The FQ-CoDel algorithm is a combined packet scheduler and AQM
   developed as part of the bufferbloat-fighting community effort.  It
   is based on a modified Deficit Round Robin (DRR) queue scheduler,
   with the CoDel AQM algorithm operating on each queue.  This document
   describes the combined algorithm; reference implementations are
   available for ns2 and ns3 and it is included in the mainline Linux
   kernel as the fq_codel queueing discipline.

   The rest of this document is structured as follows: This section
   gives some concepts and terminology used in the rest of the document,
   and gives a short informal summary of the FQ-CoDel algorithm.
   Section 2 gives an overview of the CoDel algorithm.  Section 3 covers
   the flow hashing and DRR portion.  Section 4 defines the parameters
   and data structures employed by FQ-CoDel.  Section 5 describes the
   working of the algorithm in detail.  Section 6 describes
   implementation considerations, and Section 7 lists some of the
   limitations of using flow queueing.  Section 8 outlines the current
   status of FQ-CoDel deployment and lists some possible future areas of
   inquiry, and finally, Section 12 concludes.

1.1.  Terminology and concepts

   Flow: A flow is typically identified by a 5-tuple of source IP,
   destination IP, source port, destination port, and protocol.  It can
   also be identified by a superset or subset of those parameters, or by
   mac address, or other means.

   Queue: A queue of packets represented internally in FQ-CoDel.  In
   most instances each flow gets its own queue; however because of the
   possibility of hash collisions, this is not always the case.  In an
   attempt to avoid confusion, the word 'queue' is used to refer to the
   internal data structure, and 'flow' to refer to the actual stream of
   packets being delivered to the FQ-CoDel algorithm.





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   Scheduler: A mechanism to select which queue a packet is dequeued
   from.

   CoDel AQM: The Active Queue Management algorithm employed by FQ-
   CoDel.

   DRR: Deficit round-robin scheduling.

   Quantum: The maximum amount of bytes to be dequeued from a queue at
   once.

1.2.  Informal summary of FQ-CoDel

   FQ-CoDel is a _hybrid_ of DRR [DRR] and CoDel [CODELDRAFT], with an
   optimisation for sparse flows similar to SQF [SQF2012] and DRR++
   [DRRPP].  We call this "Flow Queueing" rather than "Fair Queueing" as
   flows that build a queue are treated differently than flows that do
   not.

   FQ-CoDel stochastically classifies incoming packets into different
   queues by hashing the 5-tuple of IP protocol number and source and
   destination IP and port numbers, perturbed with a random number
   selected at initiation time (although other flow classification
   schemes can optionally be configured instead).  Each queue is managed
   by the CoDel AQM algorithm.  Packet ordering within a queue is
   preserved, since queues have FIFO ordering.

   The FQ-CoDel algorithm consists of two logical parts: the scheduler
   which selects which queue to dequeue a packet from, and the CoDel AQM
   which works on each of the queues.  The subtleties of FQ-CoDel are
   mostly in the scheduling part, whereas the interaction between the
   scheduler and the CoDel algorithm are fairly straight forward:

   At initialisation, each queue is set up to have a separate set of
   CoDel state variables.  By default, 1024 queues are created.  The
   current implementation supports anywhere from one to 64K separate
   queues, and each queue maintains the state variables throughout its
   lifetime, and so acts the same as the non-FQ CoDel variant would.
   This means that with only one queue, FQ-CoDel behaves essentially the
   same as CoDel by itself.

   On dequeue, FQ-CoDel selects a queue from which to dequeue by a two-
   tier round-robin scheme, in which each queue is allowed to dequeue up
   to a configurable quantum of bytes for each iteration.  Deviations
   from this quantum is maintained as a deficit for the queue, which
   serves to make the fairness scheme byte-based rather than a packet-
   based.  The two-tier round-robin mechanism distinguishes between
   "new" queues (which don't build up a standing queue) and "old"



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   queues, that have queued enough data to be around for more than one
   iteration of the round-robin scheduler.

   This new/old queue distinction has a particular consequence for
   queues that don't build up more than a quantum of bytes before being
   visited by the scheduler: Such queues are removed from the list, and
   then re-added as a new queue each time a packet arrives for it, and
   so will get priority over queues that do not empty out each round
   (except for a minor modification to protect against starvation,
   detailed below).  Exactly how little data a flow has to send to keep
   its queue in this state is somewhat difficult to reason about,
   because it depends on both the egress link speed and the number of
   concurrent flows.  However, in practice many things that are
   beneficial to have prioritised for typical internet use (ACKs, DNS
   lookups, interactive SSH, HTTP requests, ARP, RA, ICMP, VoIP) _tend_
   to fall in this category, which is why FQ-CoDel performs so well for
   many practical applications.  However, the implicitness of the
   prioritisation means that for applications that require guaranteed
   priority (for instance multiplexing the network control plane over
   the network itself), explicit classification is still needed.

   This scheduling scheme has some subtlety to it, which is explained in
   detail in the remainder of this document.

2.  CoDel

   CoDel is described in the the ACM Queue paper [CODEL2012], and the
   AQM working group draft [CODELDRAFT].  The basic idea is to control
   queue length, maintaining sufficient queueing to keep the outgoing
   link busy, but avoiding building up the queue beyond that point.
   This is done by preferentially dropping packets that remain in the
   queue for "too long".  Packets are dropped by head drop, which lowers
   the time for the drop signal to propagate back to the sender by the
   length of the queue, and helps trigger TCP fast retransmit sooner.

   The CoDel algorithm itself will not be described here; instead we
   refer the reader to the CoDel draft [CODELDRAFT].

3.  Flow Queueing

   The intention of FQ-CoDel's scheduler is to give each _flow_ its own
   queue, hence the term _Flow Queueing_. Rather than a perfect
   realisation of this, a hashing-based scheme is used, where flows are
   hashed into a number of buckets which each has its own queue.  The
   number of buckets are configurable, and presently defaults to 1024 in
   the Linux implementation.  This is enough to avoid hash collisions on
   a moderate number of flows as seen for instance in a home gateway.
   Depending on the characteristics of the link, this can be tuned to



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   trade off memory for a lower probability of hash collisions.  See
   Section 6 for a more in-depth discussion of this.

   By default, the flow hashing is performed on the 5-tuple of source
   and destination IP and port numbers and IP protocol number.  While
   the hashing can be customised to match on arbitrary packet bytes,
   care should be taken when doing so: Much of the benefit of the FQ-
   CoDel scheduler comes from this per-flow distinction.  However, the
   default hashing does have some limitations, as discussed in
   Section 7.

   FQ-CoDel's DRR scheduler is byte-based, employing a deficit round-
   robin mechanism between queues.  This works by keeping track of the
   current byte _deficit_ of each queue.  This deficit is initialised to
   the configurable quantum; each time a queue gets a dequeue
   opportunity, it gets to dequeue packets, decreasing the deficit by
   the packet size for each packet, until the deficit runs into the
   negative, at which point it is increased by one quantum, and the
   dequeue opportunity ends.

   This means that if one queue contains packets of, for instance, size
   quantum/3, and another contains quantum-sized packets, the first
   queue will dequeue three packets each time it gets a turn, whereas
   the second only dequeues one.  This means that flows that send small
   packets are not penalised by the difference in packet sizes; rather,
   the DRR scheme approximates a (single-)byte-based fairness queueing.
   The size of the quantum determines the scheduling granularity, with
   the tradeoff from too small a quantum being scheduling overhead.  For
   small bandwidths, lowering the quantum from the default MTU size can
   be advantageous.

   Unlike plain DRR there are two sets of flows - a "new" list for flows
   that have not built a queue recently, and an "old" list for flow-
   building queues.  This distinction is an integral part of the FQ-
   CoDel scheduler and is described in more detail in Section 5.

4.  FQ-CoDel Parameters and Data Structures

   This section goes into the parameters and data structures in FQ-
   CoDel.

4.1.  Parameters

4.1.1.  Interval

   The _interval_ parameter has the same semantics as CoDel and is used
   to ensure that the measured minimum delay does not become too stale.
   The minimum delay MUST be experienced in the last epoch of length



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   interval.  It SHOULD be set on the order of the worst-case RTT
   through the bottleneck to give end-points sufficient time to react.

   The default interval value is 100 ms.

4.1.2.  Target

   The _target_ parameter has the same semantics as CoDel.  It is the
   acceptable minimum standing/persistent queue delay for each FQ-CoDel
   Queue.  This minimum delay is identified by tracking the local
   minimum queue delay that packets experience.

   The default target value is 5 ms, but this value should be tuned to
   be at least the transmission time of a single MTU-sized packet at the
   prevalent egress link speed (which for e.g. 1Mbps and MTU 1500 is
   ~15ms), to prevent CoDel from being too aggressive at low bandwidths.
   It should otherwise be set to on the order of 5-10% of the configured
   interval.

4.1.3.  Packet limit

   Routers do not have infinite memory, so some packet limit MUST be
   enforced.

   The _limit_ parameter is the hard limit on the real queue size,
   measured in number of packets.  This limit is a global limit on the
   number of packets in all queues; each individual queue does not have
   an upper limit.  When the limit is reached and a new packet arrives
   for enqueue, a packet is dropped from the head of the largest queue
   (measured in bytes) to make room for the new packet.

   In Linux, the default packet limit is 10240 packets, which is
   suitable for up to 10GigE speeds.  In practice, the hard limit is
   rarely, if ever, hit, as drops are performed by the CoDel algorithm
   long before the limit is hit.  For platforms that are severely memory
   constrained, a lower limit can be used.

4.1.4.  Quantum

   The _quantum_ parameter is the number of bytes each queue gets to
   dequeue on each round of the scheduling algorithm.  The default is
   set to 1514 bytes which corresponds to the Ethernet MTU plus the
   hardware header length of 14 bytes.

   In TSO-enabled systems, where a "packet" consists of an offloaded
   packet train, it can presently be as large as 64K bytes.  In GRO-
   enabled systems, up to 17 times the TCP max segment size (or 25K
   bytes).  These mega-packets severely impact FQ-CoDel's ability to



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   schedule traffic, and hurt latency needlessly.  There is ongoing work
   in Linux to make smarter use of offload engines.

4.1.5.  Flows

   The _flows_ parameter sets the number of queues into which the
   incoming packets are classified.  Due to the stochastic nature of
   hashing, multiple flows may end up being hashed into the same slot.

   This parameter can be set only at load time since memory has to be
   allocated for the hash table in the current implementation.

   The default value is 1024 in the current Linux implementation.

4.1.6.  ECN

   ECN is _enabled_ by default.  Rather than do anything special with
   misbehaved ECN flows, FQ-CoDel relies on the packet scheduling system
   to minimise their impact, thus unresponsive packets in a flow being
   marked with ECN can grow to the overall packet limit, but will not
   otherwise affect the performance of the system.

   It can be disabled by specifying the _noecn_ parameter.

4.1.7.  CE_THRESHOLD

   This parameter enables DCTCP-like processing to enable CE marking ECT
   packets at a lower setpoint than the default codel target.

   ce_threshold is disabled by default and can be set to a number of
   usec to enable.

4.2.  Data structures

4.2.1.  Internal queues

   The main data structure of FQ-CoDel is the array of queues, which is
   instantiated to the number of queues specified by the _flows_
   parameter at instantiation time.  Each queue consists simply of an
   ordered list of packets with FIFO semantics, two state variables
   tracking the queue deficit and total number of bytes enqueued, and
   the set of CoDel state variables.  Other state variables to track
   queue statistics can also be included: for instance, the Linux
   implementation keeps a count of dropped packets.

   Queue space is shared: there's a global limit on the number of
   packets the queues can hold, but not one per queue.




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4.2.2.  New and old queues lists

   FQ-CoDel maintains two lists of active queues, called "new" and "old"
   queues.  Each list is an ordered list containing references to the
   array of queues.  When a packet is added to a queue that is not
   currently active, that queue becomes active by being added to the
   list of new queues.  Later on, it is moved to the list of old queues,
   from which it is removed when it is no longer active.  This behaviour
   is the source of some subtlety in the packet scheduling at dequeue
   time, explained below.

5.  The FQ-CoDel scheduler

   This section describes the operation of the FQ-CoDel scheduler and
   AQM.  It is split into two parts explaining the enqueue and dequeue
   operations.

5.1.  Enqueue

   The packet enqueue mechanism consists of three stages: classification
   into a queue, timestamping and bookkeeping, and optionally dropping a
   packet when the total number of enqueued packets goes over the
   maximum.

   When a packet is enqueued, it is first classified into the
   appropriate queue.  By default, this is done by hashing (using a
   Jenkins hash function) on the 5-tuple of IP protocol, and source and
   destination IP and port numbers, permuted by a random value selected
   at initialisation time, and taking the hash value modulo the number
   of queues.

   Once the packet has been successfully classified into a queue, it is
   handed over to the CoDel algorithm for timestamping.  It is then
   added to the tail of the selected queue, and the queue's byte count
   is updated by the packet size.  Then, if the queue is not currently
   active (i.e. if it is not in either the list of new or the list of
   old queues), it is added to the end of the list of new queues, and
   its deficit is initiated to the configured quantum.  Otherwise it is
   added to the old queue list.

   Finally, the total number of enqueued packets is compared with the
   configured limit, and if it is _above_ this value (which can happen
   since a packet was just enqueued), a packet is dropped from the head
   of the queue with the largest current byte count.  Note that this in
   most cases means that the packet that gets dropped is different from
   the one that was just enqueued, and may even be from a different
   queue.




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5.1.1.  Alternative classification schemes

   As mentioned previously, it is possible to modify the classification
   scheme to provide a different notion of a 'flow'.  The Linux
   implementation provides this option in the form of the "tc filter"
   command.  While this can add capabilities (for instance, matching on
   other possible parameters such as mac address, diffserv, firewall and
   flow specific markings, etc.), care should be taken to preserve the
   notion of 'flow' as much of the benefit of the FQ-CoDel scheduler
   comes from keeping flows in separate queues.  We are not aware of any
   deployments utilising the custom classification feature.

   An alternative to changing the classification scheme is to perform
   decapsulation prior to hashing.  The Linux implementation does this
   for common encapsulations known to the kernel, such as 6in4, IPIP and
   GRE tunnels.  This helps to distinguish between flows that share the
   same (outer) 5-tuple, but of course is limited to unencrypted tunnels
   (see Section 7.2).

5.2.  Dequeue

   Most of FQ-CoDel's work is done at packet dequeue time.  It consists
   of three parts: selecting a queue from which to dequeue a packet,
   actually dequeuing it (employing the CoDel algorithm in the process),
   and some final bookkeeping.

   For the first part, the scheduler first looks at the list of new
   queues; for each queue in that list, if that queue has a negative
   deficit (i.e.  it has already dequeued at least a quantum of bytes),
   its deficit is increased by one quantum, and the queue is put onto
   _the end of_ the list of old queues, and the routine selects the next
   queue and starts again.

   Otherwise, that queue is selected for dequeue.  If the list of new
   queues is empty, the scheduler proceeds down the list of old queues
   in the same fashion (checking the deficit, and either selecting the
   queue for dequeuing, or increasing the deficit and putting the queue
   back at the end of the list).

   After having selected a queue from which to dequeue a packet, the
   CoDel algorithm is invoked on that queue.  This applies the CoDel
   control law, and may discard one or more packets from the head of
   that queue, before returning the packet that should be dequeued (or
   nothing if the queue is or becomes empty while being handled by the
   CoDel algorithm).

   Finally, if the CoDel algorithm did not return a packet, the queue is
   empty, and the scheduler does one of two things: if the queue



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   selected for dequeue came from the list of new queues, it is moved to
   _the end of_ the list of old queues.  If instead it came from the
   list of old queues, that queue is removed from the list, to be added
   back (as a new queue) the next time a packet arrives that hashes to
   that queue.  Then (since no packet was available for dequeue), the
   whole dequeue process is restarted from the beginning.

   If, instead, the scheduler _did_ get a packet back from the CoDel
   algorithm, it updates the byte deficit for the selected queue before
   returning the packet as the result of the dequeue operation.

   The step that moves an empty queue from the list of new queues to
   _the end of_ the list of old queues before it is removed is crucial
   to prevent starvation.  Otherwise the queue could reappear (the next
   time a packet arrives for it) before the list of old queues is
   visited; this can go on indefinitely even with a small number of
   active flows, if the flow providing packets to the queue in question
   transmits at just the right rate.  This is prevented by first moving
   the queue to _the end of_ the list of old queues, forcing a pass
   through that, and thus preventing starvation.  Moving it to the end
   of the list, rather than the front, is crucial for this to work.

   The resulting migration of queues between the different states is
   summarised in the following state diagram:

   +-----------------+                +------------------+
   |                 |     Empty      |                  |
   |     Empty       |<---------------+       Old        +-----+
   |                 |                |                  |     |
   +-------+---------+                +------------------+     |
           |                             ^            ^        |Quantum
           |Arrival                      |            |        |Exceeded
           v                             |            |        |
   +-----------------+                   |            |        |
   |                 |     Empty or      |            |        |
   |      New        +-------------------+            +--------+
   |                 |  Quantum exceeded
   +-----------------+

6.  Implementation considerations

6.1.  Probability of hash collisions

   Since the Linux FQ-CoDel implementation by default uses 1024 hash
   buckets, the probability that (say) 100 VoIP sessions will all hash
   to the same bucket is something like ten to the power of minus 300.
   Thus, the probability that at least one of the VoIP sessions will
   hash to some other queue is very high indeed.



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   Conversely, the probability that each of the 100 VoIP sessions will
   get its own queue is given by (1023!/(924!*1024^99)) or about 0.007;
   so not all that probable.  The probability rises sharply, however, if
   we are willing to accept a few collisions.  For example, there is
   about an 86% probability that no more than two of the 100 VoIP
   sessions will be involved in any given collision, and about a 99%
   probability that no more than three of the VoIP sessions will be
   involved in any given collision.  These last two results were
   computed using Monte Carlo simulations: Oddly enough, the mathematics
   for VoIP-session collision exactly matches that of hardware cache
   overflow.

6.2.  Memory Overhead

   FQ-CoDel can be implemented with a very low memory footprint (less
   than 64 bytes per queue on 64 bit systems).  These are the data
   structures used in the Linux implementation:

   struct codel_vars {
      u32             count;
      u32             lastcount;
      bool            dropping;
      u16             rec_inv_sqrt;
      codel_time_t    first_above_time;
      codel_time_t    drop_next;
      codel_time_t    ldelay;
   };

   struct fq_codel_flow {
      struct sk_buff    *head;
      struct sk_buff    *tail;
      struct list_head  flowchain;
      int               deficit;
      u32               dropped; /* # of drops (or ECN marks) on flow */
      struct codel_vars cvars;
   };

   The master table managing all queues looks like this:













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   struct fq_codel_sched_data {
      struct tcf_proto *filter_list;  /* optional external classifier */
      struct fq_codel_flow *flows;    /* Flows table [flows_cnt] */
      u32             *backlogs;      /* backlog table [flows_cnt] */
      u32             flows_cnt;      /* number of flows */
      u32             perturbation;   /* hash perturbation */
      u32             quantum;        /* psched_mtu(qdisc_dev(sch)); */
      struct codel_params cparams;
      struct codel_stats cstats;
      u32             drop_overlimit;
      u32             new_flow_count;

      struct list_head new_flows;     /* list of new flows */
      struct list_head old_flows;     /* list of old flows */
   };

6.3.  Per-Packet Timestamping

   The CoDel portion of the algorithm requires per-packet timestamps be
   stored along with the packet.  While this approach works well for
   software-based routers, it may be impossible to retrofit devices that
   do most of their processing in silicon and lack space or mechanism
   for timestamping.

   Also, while perfect resolution is not needed, timestamp resolution
   below the target is necessary.  Furthermore, timestamping functions
   in the core OS need to be efficient as they are called at least once
   on each packet enqueue and dequeue.

6.4.  Other forms of "Fair Queueing"

   Much of the scheduling portion of FQ-CoDel is derived from DRR and is
   substantially similar to DRR++. SFQ-based versions have also been
   produced and tested in ns2.  Other forms of Fair Queueing, such as
   WFQ or QFQ, have not been thoroughly explored.

6.5.  Differences between CoDel and FQ-CoDel behaviour

   CoDel can be applied to a single queue system as a straight AQM,
   where it converges towards an "ideal" drop rate (i.e. one that
   minimises delay while keeping a high link utilisation), and then
   optimises around that control point.

   The scheduling of FQ-CoDel mixes packets of competing flows, which
   acts to pace bursty flows to better fill the pipe.  Additionally, a
   new flow gets substantial "credit" over other flows until CoDel finds
   an ideal drop rate for it.  However, for a new flow that exceeds the
   configured quantum, more time passes before all of its data is



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   delivered (as packets from it, too, are mixed across the other
   existing queue-building flows).  Thus, FQ-CoDel takes longer (as
   measured in time) to converge towards an ideal drop rate for a given
   new flow, but does so within fewer delivered _packets_ from that
   flow.

   Finally, the flow isolation FQ-CoDel provides means that the CoDel
   drop mechanism operates on the flows actually building queues, which
   results in packets being dropped more accurately from the largest
   flows than CoDel alone manages.  Additionally, flow isolation
   radically improves the transient behaviour of the network when
   traffic or link characteristics change (e.g. when new flows start up
   or the link bandwidth changes); while CoDel itself can take a while
   to respond, fq_codel doesn't miss a beat.

7.  Limitations of flow queueing

   While FQ-CoDel has been shown in many scenarios to offer significant
   performance gains, there are some scenarios where the scheduling
   algorithm in particular is not a good fit.  This section documents
   some of the known cases which either may require tweaking the default
   behaviour, or where alternatives to flow queueing should be
   considered.

7.1.  Fairness between things other than flows

   In some parts of the network, enforcing flow-level fairness may not
   be desirable, or some other form of fairness may be more important.
   An example of this can be an Internet Service Provider that may be
   more interested in ensuring fairness between customers than between
   flows.  Or a hosting or transit provider that wishes to ensure
   fairness between connecting Autonomous Systems or networks.  Another
   issue can be that the number of simultaneous flows experienced at a
   particular link can be too high for flow-based fairness queueing to
   be effective.

   Whatever the reason, in a scenario where fairness between flows is
   not desirable, reconfiguring FQ-CoDel to match on a different
   characteristic can be a way forward.  The implementation in Linux can
   leverage the packet matching mechanism of the _tc_ subsystem to use
   any available packet field to partition packets into virtual queues,
   to for instance match on address or subnet source/destination pairs,
   application layer characteristics, etc.

   Furthermore, as commonly deployed today, FQ-CoDel is used with three
   or more tiers of classification: priority, best effort and
   background, based on diffserv markings.  Some products do more




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   detailed classification, including deep packet inspection and
   destination-specific filters to achieve their desired result.

7.2.  Flow bunching by opaque encapsulation

   Where possible, FQ-CoDel will attempt to decapsulate packets before
   matching on the header fields for the flow hashing.  However, for
   some encapsulation techniques, most notably encrypted VPNs, this is
   not possible.  If several flows are bunched into one such
   encapsulated tunnel, they will be seen as one flow by the FQ-CoDel
   algorithm.  This means that they will share a queue, and drop
   behaviour, and so flows inside the encapsulation will not benefit
   from the implicit prioritisation of FQ-CoDel, but will continue to
   benefit from the reduced overall queue length from the CoDel
   algorithm operating on the queue.  In addition, when such an
   encapsulated bunch competes against other flows, it will count as one
   flow, and not assigned a share of the bandwidth based on how many
   flows are inside the encapsulation.

   Depending on the application, this may or may not be desirable
   behaviour.  In cases where it is not, changing FQ-CoDel's matching to
   not be flow-based (as detailed in the previous subsection above) can
   be a mitigation.  Going forward, having some mechanism for opaque
   encapsulations to express to the outer layer which flow a packet
   belongs to, could be a way to mitigate this.

7.3.  Low-priority congestion control algorithms

   In the presence of queue management schemes that contain latency
   under load, low-priority congestion control algorithms such as LEDBAT
   [RFC6817] (or, in general, algorithms that try to voluntarily use up
   less than their fair share of bandwidth) experiences very little
   added latency when the link is congested.  Thus, they lack the signal
   to back off that added latency previously afforded them.  This effect
   is seen with FQ-CoDel as well as with any effective AQM [GONG2014].

   As such, these delay-based algorithms tend to revert to loss-based
   congestion control, and will consume the fair share of bandwidth
   afforded to them by the FQ-CoDel scheduler.  However, low-priority
   congestion control mechanisms may be able to take steps to continue
   to be low priority, for instance by taking into account the vastly
   reduced level of delay afforded by an AQM, or by using a coupled
   approach to observing the behaviour of multiple flows.








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8.  Deployment status and future work

   The FQ-CoDel algorithm as described in this document has been shipped
   as part of the Linux kernel since version 3.5, released on the 21st
   of July, 2012.  The CE_THRESHOLD was added in version 4.0.  It has
   seen widespread testing in a variety of contexts and is configured as
   the default queueing discipline in a number of mainline Linux
   distributions (as of this writing at least OpenWRT, Arch Linux and
   Fedora).  We believe it to be a safe default and encourage people
   running Linux to turn it on: It is a massive improvement over the
   previous default FIFO queue.

   Of course there is always room for improvement, and this document has
   listed some of the know limitations of the algorithm.  As such, we
   encourage further research into algorithm refinements and addressing
   of limitations.  One such effort is undertaken by the bufferbloat
   community in the form of the Cake [1] queue management scheme.  In
   addition to this we believe the following (non-exhaustive) list of
   issues to be worthy of further enquiry:

   o  Variations on the flow classification mechanism to fit different
      notions of flows.  For instance, an ISP might want to deploy per-
      subscriber scheduling, while in other cases several flows can
      share a 5-tuple, as exemplified by the RTCWEB QoS recommendations
      [RTCWEB-QOS].

   o  Interactions between flow queueing and delay-based congestion
      control algorithms and scavenger protocols.

   o  Other scheduling mechanisms to replace the DRR portion of the
      algorithm, e.g.  QFQ or WFQ.

   o  Sensitivity of parameters, most notably the number of queues and
      the CoDel parameters.

9.  Security Considerations

   There are no specific security exposures associated with FQ-CoDel.
   Some exposures present in current FIFO systems are in fact reduced
   (e.g. simple minded packet floods).

10.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no actions for IANA.







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11.  Acknowledgements

   Our deepest thanks to Kathie Nichols, Van Jacobson, and all the
   members of the bufferbloat.net effort.

12.  Conclusions

   FQ-CoDel is a very general, efficient, nearly parameterless queue
   management approach combining flow queueing with CoDel.  It is a very
   powerful tool for solving bufferbloat, and we believe it to be safe
   to turn on by default, as has already happened in a number of Linux
   distributions.  In this document we have documented the Linux
   implementation in sufficient detail for an independent
   implementation, and we encourage such implementations be widely
   deployed.

13.  References

13.1.  Normative References

   [CODELDRAFT]
              Nichols, K., Jacobson, V., McGregor, A., and J. Iyengar,
              "Controlled Delay Active Queue Management", October 2014,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-aqm-codel/>.

   [RFC6817]  Shalunov, S., Hazel, G., Iyengar, J., and M. Kuehlewind,
              "Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT)", RFC 6817,
              December 2012.

   [RTCWEB-QOS]
              Dhesikan, S., Jennings, C., Druta, D., Jones, P., and J.
              Polk, "DSCP and other packet markings for RTCWeb QoS",
              December 2014, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-
              dhesikan-tsvwg-rtcweb-qos/>.

13.2.  Informative References

   [CODEL2012]
              Nichols, K. and V. Jacobson, "Controlling Queue Delay",
              July 2012, <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336>.

   [DRR]      Shreedhar, M. and G. Varghese, "Efficient Fair Queueing
              Using Deficit Round Robin", June 1996,
              <http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~siva/ECE4607/presentations/
              DRR.pdf>.






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   [DRRPP]    MacGregor, M. and W. Shi, "Deficits for Bursty Latency-
              critical Flows: DRR++", 2000, <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
              xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=875803>.

   [GONG2014]
              Gong, Y., Rossi, D., Testa, C., Valenti, S., and D. Taht,
              "Fighting the bufferbloat: on the coexistence of AQM and
              low priority congestion control", July 2014,
              <http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~drossi/paper/
              rossi14comnet-b.pdf>.

   [SQF2012]  Bonald, T., Muscariello, L., and N. Ostallo, "On the
              impact of TCP and per-flow scheduling on Internet
              Performance - IEEE/ACM transactions on Networking", April
              2012, <http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~bonald/
              Publications_files/BMO2011.pdf>.

13.3.  URIs

   [1] http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/Cake

Authors' Addresses

   Toke Hoeiland-Joergensen
   Karlstad University
   Dept. of Computer Science
   Karlstad  65188
   Sweden

   Email: toke.hoiland-jorgensen@kau.se


   Paul McKenney
   IBM Linux Technology Center
   1385 NW Amberglen Parkway
   Hillsboro, OR  97006
   USA

   Email: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
   URI:   http://www2.rdrop.com/~paulmck/











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   Dave Taht
   Teklibre
   2104 W First street
   Apt 2002
   FT Myers, FL  33901
   USA

   Email: dave.taht@gmail.com
   URI:   http://www.teklibre.com/


   Jim Gettys
   21 Oak Knoll Road
   Carlisle, MA  993
   USA

   Email: jg@freedesktop.org
   URI:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gettys


   Eric Dumazet
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheater Pkwy
   Mountain View, CA  94043
   USA

   Email: edumazet@gmail.com
























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