Matthew R. Meyer
                                                         Global Crossing
                                                           Denver Maddux
                                                             Nitrous.net
                                                   Jean-Philippe Vasseur
                                                     Cisco Systems, Inc.
                                                       Curtis Villamizar
                                                           Avici Systems
                                                           Amir Birjandi
                                                                     MCI
IETF Internet Draft
Expires: September, 2005
April, 2005




                <draft-ietf-mpls-soft-preemption-04.txt>


                MPLS Traffic Engineering Soft preemption


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Abstract

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This document details MPLS Traffic Engineering Soft Preemption, a suite
of protocol modifications extending the concept of preemption with the
goal of reducing/eliminating traffic disruption of preempted Traffic
Engineered Label Switched Paths. Initially MPLS RSVP-TE was defined
supporting only immediate Label Switched Path displacement upon
preemption. The utilization of a preemption pending flag helps more
gracefully mitigate the re-route process of preempted Label Switched
Paths. For the brief period soft preemption is activated, reservations
(though not necessarily traffic levels) are in effect under-provisioned
until the Label Switched Path can be re-routed. For this reason, the
feature is primarily but not exclusively interesting in MPLS enabled IP
networks with Differentiated Services and Traffic Engineering
capabilities.


Conventions used in this document

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 RFC-2119 [REQ-LEVELS].


. Terminology

This document follows the nomenclature of the MPLS Architecture RFC
 [MPLS-ARCH].

1.1. Acronyms and Abbreviations

CSPF            Constraint-based Shortest Path First.
DS              Differentiated Services
LER             Label Edge Router
LSR             Label Switching Router
LSP             Label Switched Path
MPLS            MultiProtocol Label Switching
PPend           Preemption Pending
RSVP            Resource ReserVation
TE              Traffic Engineering

1.2. Nomenclature

Make Before Break - Technique used to non-intrusively alter the path of
an LSP. The ingress LER first signals the new path, sharing the
bandwidth with the primary LSP (to avoid double booking), then switches
forwarding over to a new path. Finally the old path state is torn down.

Numerically Lower Preemption Priority - RSVP TE LSPs have setup and
hold preemption priorities of zero (best) through seven (worst).  A


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numerically lower setup priority LSP is capable of preempting a
numerically higher hold priority in a MPLS-TE environment.

Preemption Pending flag - This flag is set on an IPv4 or IPv6 RSVP Resv
RRO sub-object to signal to the TE LSP ingress LER that the TE LSP is
about to be preempted and must be re-signaled (in a non disruptive
fashion, with make before break) along another path. If present in the
Path RRO, it is used to alert downstream LSRs that the LSP was soft
preempted upstream.

Point of Preemption - the midpoint or ingress LSR which due to RSVP
provisioning levels is forced to either hard preempt or under-provision
and signal soft preemption.

Hard Preemption - The (typically default) preemption process in which
higher numeric priority LSPs are intrusively displaced at the point of
preemption by lower numeric priority LSPs. In hard preemption the LSP
is torn down before reestablishment.

Soft Preemption - The preemption process in which the point of
preemption allows a brief under-provisioning period while the ingress
router is alerted to the requirement for reroute. In soft preemption
the LSP is reestablished before being torn down.

Soft Preemption Desired Flag - This flag is set on the
SESSION_ATTRIBUTES Flags in the Path message for the LSP indicate to
LSRs along the path that, should the LSP need to be preempted, soft
preemption should be used if supported.


. Motivations

Initially MPLS RSVP-TE [RSVP-TE] was defined supporting only one method
of TE LSP preemption which immediately tore down TE LSPs, disregarding
the preempted in-transit traffic. This simple but abrupt process nearly
guarantees preempted traffic will be discarded, if only briefly, until
the RSVP Path Error message reaches and is processed by the ingress LER
and a new forwarding path can be established. In cases of actual
resource contention this might be helpful, however preemption may be
triggered by mere reservation contention and reservations may not
reflect forwarding plane contention up to the moment. The result is
that when conditions that promote preemption exist and hard preemption
is the default behavior, inferior priority preempted traffic may be
needlessly discarded when sufficient bandwidth exists for both the
preempted LSP and the preempting LSP

Hard preemption may be a requirement to protect numerically lower
preemption priority traffic in a non Diff-Serv enabled architecture,
but in a Diff-Serv enabled architecture, one need not rely exclusively
upon preemption to enforce a preference for the most valued traffic
since the marking and queuing disciplines should already be aligned for

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those purposes. Moreover, even in non Diff-Serv aware networks,
depending on the TE LSP sizing rules (imagine all LSPs are sized at
double their observed traffic level), reservation contention may not
accurately reflect the potential for forwarding plane congestion.


. Introduction

In an MPLS RSVP-TE [RSVP-TE] enabled IP network, hard preemption is the
default behavior. Hard preemption provides no mechanism to allow
preempted TE LSPs to be handled in a make-before-break fashion: the
hard preemption scheme instead utilizes a very intrusive method that
can cause traffic disruption for a potentially large amount of TE LSPs.
Without an alternative, network operators either accept this
limitation, or remove functionality by using only one preemption
priority or using invalid bandwidth reservation values. Understandably
desirable features like ingress LER automated TE reservation
adjustments are less palatable when preemption is intrusive and high
network stability levels are a concern.

This document defines the use of additional signaling and maintenance
mechanisms to alert the ingress LER of the preemption that is pending
and allow for temporary under-provisioning while the preempted tunnel
is re-routed in a non disruptive fashion (make-before-break) by the
ingress LER. During the period that the tunnel is being re-routed, link
capacity is under-provisioned on the midpoint where preemption
initiated and potentially one or more links upstream along the path
where other soft preemptions may have occurred. Optionally the
downstream path to the egress LER may be signaled as well to more
efficiently deal with any near simultaneous soft preemptions that may
have been triggered downstream of the initial preemption.


. RSVP Extensions

4.1. SESSION-ATTRIBUTES Flags

To explicitly signal the desire for a TE LSP to benefit from the soft
preemption mechanism (and so not to be hard preempted), the following
flag of the SESSION-ATTRIBUTE object (for both the C-Type 1 and 7) is
defined:

Soft preemption desired:  0x40

4.2. RRO IPv4/IPv6 Sub-Object Flags

To report that a soft preemption is pending for an LSP, a flag is
defined in the IPv4/IPv6 sub-object carried in the RRO object message
defined in RFC3209[RSVP-TE]. This flag is called the preemption pending
(PPend) flag. A compliant LSR MUST support the RRO object, as defined
in RFC 3209[RSVP-TE].

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RRO IPv4 and IPv6 sub-object address

These two sub-objects currently have the following flags defined in RFC
 [RSVP-TE]and [FAST-REROUTE]:

  Local protection available: 0x01
     Indicates that the link downstream of this node is protected via a
     local repair mechanism, which can be either one-to-one or facility
     backup.

  Local protection in use: 0x02
     Indicates that a local repair mechanism is in use to maintain this
     tunnel (usually in the face of an outage of the link it was
     previously routed over, or an outage of the neighboring node).

  Bandwidth protection: 0x04
     The PLR will set this when the protected LSP has a backup path
     which is guaranteed to provide the desired bandwidth specified in
     the FAST_REROUTE object or the bandwidth of the protected LSP, if
     no FAST_REROUTE object was included. The PLR may set this whenever
     the desired bandwidth is guaranteed; the PLR MUST set this flag
     when the desired bandwidth is guaranteed and the "bandwidth
     protection desired" flag was set in the SESSION_ATTRIBUTE object.
     If the requested bandwidth is not guaranteed, the PLR MUST NOT set
     this flag.

  Node protection: 0x08
     The PLR will set this when the protected LSP has a backup path
     which provides protection against a failure of the next LSR along
     the protected LSP. The PLR may set this whenever node protection
     is provided by the protected LSP's backup path; the PLR MUST set
     this flag when the node protection is provided and the "node
     protection desired" flag was set in the SESSION_ATTRIBUTE object.
     If node protection is not provided, the PLR MUST NOT set this
     flag. Thus, if a PLR could only setup a link-protection backup
     path, the "Local protection available" bit will be set but the
     "Node protection" bit will be cleared.


Soft preemption makes use of the Preemption pending flag defined here:

  Preemption pending: 0x10
     The preempting node sets this flag if a pending preemption is in
     progress for the TE LSP. This indicates to the ingress LER of this
     LSP that it SHOULD be re-routed.

4.3. Use of the RRO IPv4/IPv6 Sub-Object in Path message

An LSR MAY use the Preemption pending flag in the IPv4/IPv6 RRO sub-
object carried in a PATH RRO message to simultaneously alert downstream

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LSRs that the LSP was soft preempted upstream.  This information could
be used by the downstream LSR to bias future soft preemption candidates
toward LSPs already soft preempted elsewhere in their path.


. Mode of Operation

5.1. Example set up

R0--1G--R1---155----R2          LSP1:        LSP2:
        | \         |
        |   \      155        R0-->R1      R1<--R2
        |    \      |                 \      |
       155   1G     R3                 V     V
        |       \   |                 R5     R4
        |        \ 155
        |          \|
        R4------1G--R5

Fig 1.

In the network depicted above in figure 1, consider the following
conditions:

-Reservable BW on R0-R1, R1-R5 and R4-R5 is 1Gb/sec
-Reservable BW on R1-R2, R1-R4, R2-R3, R3-R5 is 155 Mb/sec.
-Bandwidths and costs are identical in both directions
-Each circuit has an IGP metric of 10 and IGP metric is used by CSPF
-Two TE tunnels are defined:
        -LSP1: 155 Mb, setup/hold priority 0 tunnel path R0-R1-R5.
        -LSP2: 155 Mb, setup/hold priority 7 tunnel path R2-R1-R4.
Both TE LSPs are signaled with the soft preemption desired bit of their
SESSION-ATTRIBUTE Path object set.
-Circuit R1-R5 fails.
-Soft Preemption is functional.

5.2. Basic Operation

When the circuit R1-R5 fails, R1 detects the failure and sends an
updated IGP LSA/LSP and Path Error message to all the ingress LERs
having a TE LSP traversing the failed link (R0 in the example above).
Either form of notification may arrive at the ingress LERs first. Upon
receiving the link failure notification, ingress LER R0 triggers a TE
LSP re-route of LSP1, and re-signals LSP1 along shortest path available
satisfying the TE LSP constraints: R0-R1-R4-R5 path. The Resv messages
for LSP1 travel in the upstream direction (from the destination to the
ingress LSR - R5 to R0 in this example). LSP2 is soft preempted at R1
as it has a numerically lower priority value and both bandwidth
reservations cannot be satisfied on the R1-R4 link.

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Instead of sending a path tear for LSP2 upon preemption as with hard
preemption (which would result in an immediate traffic disruption for
LSP2), R1s local BW accounting for LSP2 is zeroed and a preemption
pending flagged Resv RRO for LSP2 is issued upstream toward the ingress
LER, R2. Optionally, R1 MAY simultaneously send a soft preemption
flagged Path RRO notifying downstream LSRs of LSP2s soft preemption.
If more than one soft preempted LSP has the same ingress LER (egress
LER), these soft preemption Resv (Path) messages MAY be bundled
together (see [REFRESH-REDUCTION]).

The preempting node MUST immediately send a Resv message with the
preemption pending RRO flag set for each soft preempted TE LSP.  The
node MAY use the occurrence of soft preemption to trigger an immediate
IGP update or influence the scheduling of an IGP update.

Should a refresh event for LSP2 arrive before LSP2 is re-routed, soft
preempting nodes such as R1 MUST continue to refresh the LSP.  Resv
messages with the RRO preemption pending flag set SHOULD be sent in
reliable mode (see [REFRESH-REDUCTION]).

Upon reception of the Resv with the preemption pending flag set, the
ingress LER (of LSP2 in this case) MAY update the working copy of the
TE-DB before running CSPF for the new LSP.  In the case that Diff-Serv
[DIFF-MPLS] & TE [RSVP-TE]are deployed (as opposed to Diff-Serv-aware
TE [DS-TE]), receiving preemption pending may imply to a ingress LER
that the available bandwidth for the affected priority level and
numerically greater priority levels has been exhausted for the
indicated node interface.  An ingress LER MAY choose to reduce or zero
available BW for the implied priority range until more accurate
information is available (i.e. a new IGP TE update is received).

In the case that reservation availability is restored at the point of
preemption (R1) the point of preemption MAY issue a Resv message with
the preemption pending flag unset to signal restoration to the ingress
LER.  This implies that a ingress LER might have delayed or been
unsuccessful in re-signaling.

To guard against a situation where bandwidth under-provisioning will
last forever, a local timer (soft preemption expiration timer) MUST be
started on the preemption node, upon soft preemption. If this timer
expires, the soft preempted TE LSP SHOULD be hard preempted.

After the ingress LER has successfully established a new LSP, the old
path MUST be torn down.

As a result of soft preemption, no traffic will be needlessly black
holed due to mere reservation contention.  If loss is to occur, it will
be due only to an actual traffic congestion scenario and according to
the operators Diff-Serv (if Diff-Serv is deployed) and queuing scheme.


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5.3. Selection of the preempted TE LSP at a preempting mid-point

When a numerically lower priority TE LSP is signaled that requires the
preemption of a set of numerically higher priority LSPs, the node where
preemption is to occur has to make a decision on the set of TE LSP,
candidates for preemption. This decision is a local decision and
various algorithms can be used, depending on the objective. See
[PREEMPT-EXP].

As already mentioned, soft preemption causes a temporary link under
provisioning condition while the soft preempted TE LSPs are rerouted
by their respective ingress LERs.  In order to reduce this under
provisioning exposure, a soft-preempting LSR MAY check first if there
exists soft preempt-able TE LSP bandwidth flagged PPend by another node
but still available for soft-preemption locally. If sufficient overlap
bandwidth exists the LSR MAY attempt to soft preempt the same LSP. This
would help reducing the temporarily elevated under-provisioning ratio
on the links where soft preemption occurs.

Optionally, a midpoint LSR upstream or downstream from a soft
preempting node MAY choose to cache the LSPs soft preempted state. In
the event a local preemption is needed, the relevant priority level
LSPs from the cache are soft preempted first, followed by the normal
soft and hard preemption selection process for the given priority.


5.4. Interoperability

Backward compatibility should be assured as long as the implementation
followed the recommendations set forth in RFC 3209[RSVP-TE]. When
processing an RRO, unrecognized subobjects SHOULD be ignored and passed
on. An LSR without soft preemption capabilities but that followed the
aforementioned recommendation will simply ignore the RRO Preemption
Pending flag and treat the Resv message as a regular Resv refresh
message. As a consequence, the soft preempted TE LSP will not be
rerouted with make before break by the ingress LER.

As mentioned prior, to guard against a situation where bandwidth under-
provisioning will last forever, a local timer (soft preemption
expiration timer) MUST be started on the preemption node, upon soft
preemption. When this timer expires, the soft preempted TE LSP SHOULD
be hard preempted. This timer MAY be configurable. Optionally, an
implementation MAY choose to soft preempt TE LSP for which the 'Soft
preemption desired' bit has not been set. This might have the effect of
buying time during extremely short term preemptions. The current hard
preemption scheme can be emulated with a soft preemption expiration
timer set to zero.




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Soft Preemption as defined in this document is designed for use in MPLS
RSVP-TE enabled IP Networks and may not functionally translate to some
GMPLS technologies. As with backward compatibility, if a device does
not recognize a flag, it should pass the subobject transparently.


. Management

Both the point of preemption and the ingress LER SHOULD provide some
form of accounting internally and to the network operator interface
with regard to which TE LSPs and how much capacity is under-provisioned
due to soft preemption.

Displays of under-provisioning are recommended for the following
midpoint, ingress and egress views:
 - Sum of current bandwidth per preemption priority per local interface
 - Sum of current bandwidth total per local interface
 - Sum of current bandwidth total local router (ingress, egress,
midpoint)
 - List current LSPs and bandwidth in PPend status
 - List current sum bandwidth and session count in PPend status per
observed ERO hops (ingress, egress views only).
 - Cumulative PPend events per observed ERO hops.


. IANA Considerations

IANA [RFC-IANA] will not need to create a new registry. This document
requires the assignment of flags related to RFC3209[RSVP-TE] sections
4.1.1.1, 4.1.1.2, 4.7.1 and 4.7.2.

IANA will assign RRO IPv4/IPv6 sub-object flags defined in RFC3209
[RSVP-TE] sec 4.1.1.1 and 4.1.1.2 as detailed in section 4.2 of this
document.

IANA will assign session attribute flags for both the C-Type 1 and 7
(defined in RFC3209 [RSVP-TE] sec 4.7.1 and 4.7.2) as detailed in
section 4.1 of this document.


. Security Considerations

This document does not introduce new security issues. The security
considerations pertaining to the original RSVP protocol [RSVP] remain
relevant.


. Acknowledgment



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The authors would like to thank Carol Iturralde, Dave Cooper, Loa
Andersson, Arthi Ayyangar, and Ina Minei for their valuable comments.


. IPR Disclosure Acknowledgement

By submitting this Internet-Draft, I certify that any applicable patent
or other IPR claims of which I am aware have been disclosed, and any of
which I become aware will be disclosed, in accordance with  RFC 3668.

The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to
pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
this document or the extent to which any license under such rights
might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has
made any independent effort to identify any such rights.  Information
on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be
found in BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any
assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an
attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of
such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this
specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at
http://www.ietf.org/ipr.

The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary
rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement
this standard.  Please address the information to the IETF at
ietf-ipr@ietf.org.

. References

11.1. Normative References

[MPLS-ARCH] Rosen, Viswanathan, Callon, "Multiprotocol Label Switching
Architecture",  RFC3031, January 2001.

[RSVP-TE] Awduche et al, "RSVP-TE: Extensions to RSVP for LSP Tunnels",
RFC3209, December 2001.

[FAST-REROUTE] Pan, P. et al., "Fast Reroute Extentions to RSVP-TE for
LSP Tunnels", Internet Draft, draft-ietf-mpls-rsvp-lsp-fastreroute-
06.txt, November, 2004

[ISIS-TE] Smit, Li, IS-IS extensions for Traffic Engineering, draft-
ietf-isis-traffic-04.txt, December 2002.

[OSPF-TE] Katz, Kompella, Yeung, Traffic Engineering (TE) Extensions to
OSPF Version 2, RFC 3630, September 2003.

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11.2. Informative references

[REQ-LEVELS] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels," RFC 2119.

[RSVP] R. Braden, Ed., et al, "Resource ReSerVation protocol (RSVP) --
version 1 functional specification," RFC2205, September 1997.

[TE-REQ] Awduche et al, Requirements for Traffic Engineering over MPLS,
RFC2702, September 1999.

[DS-TE] Le Faucheur et al, "Requirements for support of Diff-Serv-aware
MPLS Traffic Engineering", RFC3564, July  2003.

[DS-TE-PROT] Le Faucheur et al, "Protocol extensions for support of
Diff-Serv-aware MPLS Traffic Engineering", draft-ietf-tewg-diff-te-
proto-06.txt, January 2004

[REFRESH-REDUCTION] Berger et al, "RSVP Refresh Overhead Reduction
Extensions", RFC 2961, April 2001.

[PREEMPT-EXP]DE Oliviera, JP. Vasseur, L.Chen and C. Scoglio " LSP
Preemption Polcies for MPLS Traffic Engineering",
daft-deoliviera-diff-te-preemption-02.txt, October 2003

[DIFF-MPLS]  Le Faucheur, F., Wu, L., Davie, B., Davari, S., Vaananen,
P., Krishnan, R., Cheval, P. and J. Heinanen, "Multi-Protocol Label
Switching (MPLS) Support of Differentiated Services", RFC 3270, May
2002.
[RFC-IANA] T. Narten and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA
Considerations Section in RFCs", RFC 2434.



. Authors' Addresses

Matthew R. Meyer
Global Crossing
 Indian Valley Tr.
Howell, MI 48855
USA
email: mrm@gblx.net, mrm@packetshovel.net

Denver Maddux
Nitrous.net
 SW 35th St
Corvallis, OR 97333

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USA
email: denver@nitrous.net

Jean Philippe Vasseur
Cisco Systems, Inc.
 Beaver Brook Road
Boxborough , MA - 01719
USA
Email: jpv@cisco.com

Curtis Villamizar
Avici Systems Inc.
USA
Email: curtis@avici.com

Amir Birjandi
MCI
 Louden County pky
Ashburn, VA 20147
USA

. Full Copyright Statement

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005).  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 AND THE
INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF
THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.


















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