Internet Engineering Task Force           Gagan L. Choudhury, Editor
   Internet Draft                                                  AT&T
   Expires in February, 2004
   Category: Best Current Practice                         August, 2003
   draft-ietf-ospf-scalability-06.txt



           Prioritized Treatment of Specific OSPF
           Packets and Congestion Avoidance



Status of this Memo

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Abstract

   This document recommends methods that are intended to improve the
   scalability and stability of large networks using OSPF (Open Shortest
   Path First) protocol.  The methods include processing OSPF Hellos and
   LSA (Link State Advertisement) Acknowledgments at a higher priority
   compared to other OSPF packets, and other congestion avoidance
   procedures.








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Table of Contents

   1. Introduction...................................................2
   2. Recommendations................................................3
   3. Security Considerations........................................6
   4. Acknowledgments................................................6
   5. Normative Reference............................................6
   6. Informative References.........................................6
   7. Contributing Authors and their Addresses.......................8
   Appendix A. LSA Storm: Causes and Impact..........................8
   Appendix B. List of Variables and Values.........................11
   Appendix C. Other Recommendations................................12

1. Introduction

   A large network running OSPF [Ref1] protocol may occasionally
   experience the simultaneous or near-simultaneous update of a large
   number of link-state-advertisements, or LSAs.  This is particularly
   true if OSPF traffic engineering extension [Ref2] is used which
   may significantly increase the number of LSAs in the network.
   We call this event, an LSA storm and it may be initiated by an
   unscheduled failure or a scheduled maintenance event.
   The failure may be hardware, software, or procedural in nature.

   The LSA storm causes high CPU and memory utilization at the router
   causing incoming packets to be delayed or dropped.
   Delayed acknowledgments (beyond the retransmission timer value)
   result in retransmissions, and delayed Hello packets (beyond the
   router-dead interval) result in neighbor adjacencies being declared
   down. The retransmissions and additional LSA originations result in
   further CPU and memory usage, essentially causing a positive feedback
   loop, which, in the extreme case, may drive the network to an
   unstable state.

   The default value of retransmission timer is 5 seconds and that of
   the router-dead interval is 40 seconds.  However, recently there
   has been a lot of interest in significantly reducing OSPF convergence
   time. As part of that plan much shorter (sub-second) Hello and
   router-dead intervals have been proposed [Ref3].  In such a scenario
   it will be more likely for Hello packets to be delayed beyond
   the router-dead interval during network congestion
   caused by an LSA storm.

   In order to improve the scalability and stability of networks we
   recommend steps for prioritizing critical OSPF packets and avoiding
   congestion. The details of the recommendations are given in Section
   2.  A simulation study is reported in [Ref12] that quantifies the
   congestion phenomenon and its impact.  It also studies several of the
   recommendations and shows that they indeed improve the scalability
   and stability of networks using OSPF protocol.  [Ref12] is available


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   on request by contacting the editor or one of the authors.

   Appendix A explains in more detail LSA storm scenarios,
   their impact, and points out a few real-life examples of
   control-message storms.  Appendix B provides a list of variables
   used in the recommendations and their example values.
   Appendix C provides some further recommendations with similar goals.

2. Recommendations

   The Recommendations below are intended to improve the scalability
   and stability of large networks using OSPF protocol.  During
   periods of network congestion they would reduce retransmissions,
   avoid an adjacency to be declared down due to Hello packets
   being delayed beyond the RouterDeadInterval, and take other
   congestion avoidance steps.  The recommendations are unordered
   except that Recommendation 2 is to be implemented only if
   Recommendation 1 is not implemented.

   (1) Classify all OSPF packets in two classes: a "high priority"
       class comprising of OSPF Hello packets and Link State
       Acknowledgment packets, and a "low priority" class
       comprising of all other packets. The classification is
       accomplished by examining the OSPF packet header. While
       receiving a packet from a neighbor and while transmitting
       a packet to a neighbor, try to process a "high priority"
       packet ahead of a "low priority" packet.

       The prioritized processing may cause OSPF packets from a neighbor
       to be received out of sequence. If
       Cryptographic Authentication (AuType = 2) is used (as specified
       in [Ref1]) then successive received valid OSPF packets from a
       neighbor need to have a non-decreasing "Cryptographic sequence
       number".  To comply with this requirement we recommend that
       the receiver maintain two separate sequence numbers for OSPF
       packets belonging to the two priority classes.  This will work
       since within the same priority class, OSPF packets will be
       received in sequence.

   (2) If the Recommendation 1 cannot be implemented then reset the
       inactivity timer for an adjacency whenever any OSPF unicast
       packet or any OSPF packet sent to AllSPFRouters over a
       point-to-point link is received over that adjacency instead of
       resetting the inactivity timer only on receipt of the
       Hello packet.  So OSPF would declare the adjacency to be down
       only if no OSPF unicast packets or no OSPF packets sent to
       AllSPFRouters over a point-to-point link are received over
       that adjacency for a period equaling or exceeding the
       RouterDeadInterval.  The reason for not recommending this
       proposal in conjunction with Recommendation 1 is to avoid


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       potential undesirable side effects.  One such effect is the
       delay in discovering the down status of
       an adjacency in a case where no high priority Hello packets are
       being received but the inactivity timer is being reset by other
       stale packets in the low priority queue.

   (3) Use an Exponential Backoff algorithm for determining the value
       of the LSA retransmission interval (RxmtInterval).  Let R(i)
       represent the RxmtInterval value used during the i-th
       retransmission of an LSA.  Use the following algorithm to
       compute R(i)

                    R(1) = Rmin
                    R(i+1) = Min(KR(i),Rmax)  for i>=1

       where K, Rmin and Rmax are constants and the function
       Min(.,.) represents the minimum value of its two arguments.
       Example values for K, Rmin and Rmax may be 2, 5 seconds
       and 40 seconds respectively.  Note that the example value for
       Rmin, the initial retransmission interval, is the same as the
       sample value of RxmtInterval in [Ref1].

       This recommendation is motivated by the observation that during
       a network congestion event caused by control messages, a major
       source for sustaining the congestion is the repeated
       retransmission of LSAs.  The use of an Exponential Backoff
       algorithm for the LSA retransmission interval reduces the rate
       of LSA retransmissions while the network experiences
       congestion (during which it is more likely that multiple
       retransmissions of the same LSA would happen).  This in turn
       helps the network get out of the congested state.

   (4) Implicit Congestion Detection and Action Based on That:
       If there is control message congestion at a router, its
       neighbors do not know about that explicitly.  However, they
       can implicitly detect it based on the number of unacknowledged
       LSAs to this router.  If this number exceeds a certain "high
       water mark" then the rate at which LSAs are sent to this router
       should be reduced progressively using an exponential backoff
       mechanism but not below a certain minimum rate.  At a future
       time, if the number of unacknowledged LSAs to this router falls
       below a certain "low water mark" then the rate of sending
       LSAs to this router should be increased progressively, again
       using an exponential backoff mechanism but not above a certain
       maximum rate.  The whole algorithm is given below.  It is to be
       noted that this algorithm is to be applied independently to each
       neighbor and only for unicast LSAs sent to a neighbor or LSAs
       sent to AllSPFRouters over a point-to-point link.

       Let,
       U(t) = Number of unacknowledged LSAs to neighbor at time t.

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       H = A high water mark (in units of number of unacknowledged LSAs)
       L = A low water mark (in units of number of unacknowledged LSAs)
       G(t) = Gap between sending successive LSAs to neighbor at time t.
       F = The factor by which the above gap is to be increased during
           congestion and decreased after coming out of congestion.
       T = Minimum time that has to elapse before the existing gap
           is considered for change.
       Gmin = Minimum allowed value of gap.
       Gmax = Maximum allowed value of gap.

       The equation below shows how the gap is to be changed after a
       time T has elapsed since the last change:
                 _
                |
                | Min(FG(t),Gmax) if U(t+T) > H
       G(t+T) = | G(t) if H >= U(t+T) >= L
                | Max(G(t)/F,Gmin) if U(t+T) < L
                |_

       Min(.,.) and Max(.,.) represent the minimum and maximum values
       of the two arguments respectively.
       Example values for the various parameters of the algorithm are
       as follows: H = 20, L = 10, F = 2, T = 1 second, Gmin = 20 ms,
       Gmax = 1 second.

       Recommendations 3 and 4 both slow down LSAs to congested
       neighbors based on implicitly detecting the congestion but
       they have important differences. Recommendation 3 progressively
       slows down successive retransmissions of the same LSA whereas
       Recommendation 3 progressively slows down all LSAs (new or
       retransmission) to a congested neighbor.

   (5) Throttling Adjacencies to be Brought Up Simultaneously:
       If a router tries to bring up a large number of adjacencies to
       its neighbors simultaneously then that may cause severe
       congestion due to database synchronization and LSA flooding
       activities.  It is recommended that during such a situation
       no more than "n" adjacencies should be brought up
       simultaneously.  Once a subset of adjacencies have been brought
       up successfully, newer adjacencies may be brought up as long as
       the number of simultaneous adjacencies being brought up does not
       exceed "n". The appropriate value of "n" would depend on the
       router processing power, link bandwidth and propagation delay.
       The value of "n" should be configurable.

       In the presence of throttling, an important issue is the order
       in which adjacencies are to be formed.  We recommend a First
       Come First Served (FCFS) policy based on the order in which the
       request for adjacency formation arrives.  Requests may either be


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       from neighbors or self-generated. Among the self-generated
       requests a priority list may be used to decide the order in which
       the requests are to be made.  However, once an adjacency
       formation process starts it is not to be preempted except
       for unusual circumstances such as errors or time-outs.

3. Security Considerations

   This memo creates one new security issue for the OSPF protocol.
   Recommendation 1 in Section 2 and Recommendation 2 in Appendix C
   proposes prioritized processing of OSPF packets which may cause
   packets from a neighbor to be received out of sequence.
   If Cryptographic Authentication (AuType = 2) is used (as specified
   in [Ref1]) then successive received valid OSPF packets from a
   neighbor need to have a non-decreasing "Cryptographic sequence
   number".  To comply with this requirement we recommend that
   the receiver maintain separate sequence numbers for OSPF
   packets belonging to different priority classes.  This will work
   since within the same priority class, OSPF packets will be
   received in sequence.

   Security considerations for the base OSPF protocol are
   covered in [Ref1].

4. Acknowledgments

   We would like to acknowledge the support and helpful comments from
   OSPF WG chairs Rohit Dube, Acee Lindem, John Moy and Routing Area
   directors Alex Zinin and Bill Fenner.  We acknowledge Vivek Dube,
   Mitchell Erblich, Mike Fox, Tony Przygienda, and Krishna Rao for
   comments on previous versions of the draft.  We also acknowledge
   Margaret Chiosi, Elie Francis, Jeff Han, Beth Munson,
   Roshan Rao, Moshe Segal, Mike Wardlow, and Pat Wirth for
   collaboration and encouragement in our scalability
   improvement efforts for Link-State-Protocol based networks.

5. Normative Reference

   [Ref1] J. Moy, "OSPF Version 2", RFC 2328, April, 1998.

6. Informative References

   [Ref2] D. Katz, D. Yeung, K. Kompella, "Traffic Engineering
   Extension to OSPF Version 2," Work in Progress.

   [Ref3] C. Alaettinoglu, V. Jacobson and H. Yu, "Towards Milli-
   second IGP Convergence," Work in Progress.

   [Ref4] Pappalardo, D., "AT&T, customers grapple with ATM net
   outage," Network World, February 26, 2001.


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   [Ref5] "AT&T announces cause of frame-relay network outage," AT&T
   Press Release, April 22, 1998.

   [Ref6] Cholewka, K., "MCI Outage Has Domino Effect," Inter@ctive
   Week, August 20, 1999.

   [Ref7] Jander, M., "In Qwest Outage, ATM Takes Some Heat," Light
   Reading, April 6, 2001.

   [Ref8] A. Zinin and M. Shand, "Flooding Optimizations in Link-State
   Routing Protocols," Work in Progress.

   [Ref9] P. Pillay-Esnault, "OSPF Refresh and flooding reduction in
   stable topologies," Work in progress.

   [Ref10] G. Ash, G. Choudhury, V. Sapozhnikova, M. Sherif, A.
   Maunder, V. Manral, "Congestion Avoidance & Control for OSPF
   Networks", Work in Progress.

   [Ref11] B. M. Waxman, "Routing of Multipoint Connections," IEEE
   Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 6(9):1617-1622, 1988.

   [Ref12] G. Choudhury, G. Ash, V. Manral, A. Maunder and V.
   Sapozhnikova, "Prioritized Treatment of Specific OSPF Packets
   and Congestion Avoidance: Algorithms and Simulations," AT&T
   Technical Report, August, 2003.

   [Ref13] K. Nichols, S. Blake, F. Baker and D. Black, "Definition of
   the Differentiated Services Field (DS Field) in the IPV4 and IPV6
   Headers", RFC 2474, December, 1998.





















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7. Contributing Authors and their Addresses

   In addition to the Editor, several people contributed to this
   document.  The names and contact information of all authors
   are given below.


   Gagan L. Choudhury                     Anurag S. Maunder
   AT&T                                   Erlang Technology
   Room D5-3C21                           2880 Scott Boulevard
   200 Laurel Avenue                      Santa Clara, CA 95052
   Middletown, NJ, 07748                  USA
   USA                                    Phone: (408)420-7617
   Phone: (732)420-3721                   email: anuragm@erlangtech.com
   email: gchoudhury@att.com


   Gerald R. Ash                          Vera D. Sapozhnikova
   AT&T                                   AT&T
   Room D5-2A01                           Room C5-2C29
   200 Laurel Avenue                      200 Laurel Avenue
   Middletown, NJ, 07748                  Middletown, NJ, 07748
   USA                                    USA
   Phone: (732)420-4578                   Phone: (732)420-2653
   email: gash@att.com                    email: sapozhnikova@att.com


   Vishwas Manral
   Motorola Inc.
   189, Prashasan Nagar,
   Road Number 72
   Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad
   India
   email: vishwas@motorola.com



Appendix A. LSA Storm: Causes and Impact

   An LSA storm may be initiated due to many reasons.  Here
   are some examples:

   (a) one or more link failures due to fiber cuts,

   (b) one or more router failures for some reason, e.g., software
       crash or some type of disaster (including power outage)
       in an office complex hosting many routers,

   (c) Link/router flapping,


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   (d) requirement of taking down and later bringing back many
       routers during a software/hardware upgrade,

   (e) near-synchronization of the periodic 1800 second LSA refreshes
       of a subset of LSAs,

   (f) refresh of all LSAs in the system during a change in software
       version,

   (g) injecting a large number of external routes to OSPF due to
       a procedural error,

   (h) Router ID changes causing a large number of LSA re-originations
       (possibly LSA purges as well depending on the implementation).

   In addition to the LSAs originated as a direct result of link/router
   failures, there may be other indirect LSAs as well.  One example in
   MPLS networks is traffic engineering LSAs [Ref2] originated at other
   links as a result of significant change in reserved bandwidth
   resulting from rerouting of Label Switched Paths (LSPs) that went
   down during the link/router failure.
   The LSA storm causes high CPU and memory utilization at the router
   processor causing incoming packets to be delayed or dropped.
   Delayed acknowledgments (beyond the retransmission timer value)
   results in retransmissions, and delayed Hello packets (beyond the
   Router-Dead interval) results in links being declared down.  A
   trunk-down event causes Router LSA origination by its end-point
   routers.  If traffic engineering LSAs are used for each link then
   that type of LSAs would also be originated by the end-point routers
   and potentially elsewhere as well due to significant changes in
   reserved bandwidths at other links caused by the failure and reroute
   of LSPs originally using the failed trunk.  Eventually, when the
   link recovers that would also trigger additional Router LSAs and
   traffic engineering LSAs.

   The retransmissions and additional LSA originations result in further
   CPU and memory usage, essentially causing a positive feedback loop.
   We define the LSA storm size as the number of LSAs in the original
   storm and not counting any additional LSAs resulting from the
   feedback loop described above.  If the LSA storm is too large then
   the positive feedback loop mentioned above may be large enough to
   indefinitely sustain a large CPU and memory utilization at many
   routers in the network, thereby driving the network to an unstable
   state. In the past, network
   outage events have been reported in IP and ATM networks using
   link-state protocols such as OSPF, IS-IS, PNNI or some proprietary
   variants.  See for example [Ref4-Ref7].  In many of these examples,




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   large scale flooding of LSAs or other similar control messages
   (either naturally or triggered by some bug or inappropriate
   procedure) have been partly or fully responsible for network
   instability and outage.

   In [Ref12] a simulation model is used to show that there
   is a certain LSA storm size threshold above which the
   network may show unstable behavior caused by large number of
   retransmissions, link failures due to missed Hello packets and
   subsequent link recoveries.  It is also shown
   that the LSA storm size causing instability may be substantially
   increased by providing prioritized treatment to Hello and LSA
   Acknowledgment packets and by using an exponential backoff
   algorithm for determining the LSA retransmission interval.
   If it is not possible to prioritize Hello packets then resetting
   the inactivity timer on receiving any valid OSPF packets can also
   provide the same benefit. Furthermore, if we prioritize Hello
   packets then even when the network operates somewhat above the
   stability threshold, links are not declared down due to missed
   Hellos.  This implies that even though there is
   control plane congestion due to many retransmissions, the data plane
   stays up and no new LSAs are originated (besides the ones in the
   original storm and the refreshes).  These observations support
   the first three recommendations in Section 2. The authors of this
   draft have also done simulations to verify that the other
   recommendations in Section 2 helps avoid congestion and allows a
   graceful exit from a congested state.

   One might argue that the scalability issue of large networks should
   be solved solely by dividing the network hierarchically into
   multiple areas so that flooding of LSAs remains localized within
   areas.  However, this approach increases the network management
   and design complexity and may result in less optimal routing between
   areas. Also, ASE LSAs are flooded throughout the AS and it may be
   a problem if there are large numbers of them.  Furthermore,
   a large number of summary LSAs may need to be flooded across
   Areas and their numbers would increase significantly if
   multiple Area Border Routers are employed for the purpose of
   reliability. Thus it is important to allow the network to grow
   towards as large a size as possible under a single area.

   The recommendations in the draft are synergistic with a broader set
   of scalability and stability improvement proposals. [Ref8] proposes
   flooding overhead reduction in case more than one interface goes to
   the same neighbor.  [Ref9] proposes a mechanism for
   greatly reducing LSA refreshes in stable topologies.

   [Ref10] proposes a wide range of congestion control and failure
   recovery mechanisms (some of those ideas are covered in this
   draft but [Ref10] has other ideas not covered here).


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Appendix B. List of Variables and Values

   F    = The factor by which the gap between sending successive LSAs to
          a neighbor is to be increased during congestion and decreased
          after coming out of congestion (used in Recommendation 4).
          Example value is 2.

   G(t) = Gap between sending successive LSAs to a neighbor at time t
          (used in Recommendation 4).

   Gmax = Maximum allowed value of gap between sending successive LSAs
          to a neighbor (used in Recommendation 4). Example value is 1
          second.

   Gmin = Minimum allowed value of gap between sending successive LSAs
          to a neighbor (used in Recommendation 4). Example value is
          20 ms.

   H    = A high water mark (in units of number of unacknowledged LSAs).
          Exceeding this mark would trigger a potential increase in the
          gap between sending successive LSAs to a neighbor.
          (used in Recommendation 4). Example value is 20.

   K    = A multiplicative constant used in increasing the RxmtInterval
          value used during successive retransmissions of the same LSA
          (used in Recommendation 3). Example value is 2.

   L    = A low water mark (in units of number of unacknowledged LSAs)
          Dropping below this mark would trigger a potential decrease
          in the gap between sending successive LSAs to a neighbor.
          (used in Recommendation 4). Example value is 10.

   n    = Upper limit on the number of adjacencies to be brought up
          simultaneously (used in Recommendation 5).

   R(i) = RxmtInterval value used during the i-th retransmission of
          an LSA (used in Recommendation 3).

   Rmax = The maximum allowed value of RxmtInterval (used in
          Recommendation 3). Example value is 40 seconds.

   Rmin = The minimum allowed value of RxmtInterval (used in
          Recommendation 3). Example value is 5 seconds.

   T    = Minimum time that has to elapse before the existing gap
          between sending successive LSAs to a neighbor
          is considered for change (used in Recommendation 4). Example
          value is 1 second.



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   U(t) = Number of unacknowledged LSAs to a neighbor at time t
          (used in Recommendation 4).


Appendix C. Other Recommendations

   (1) Explicit Marking:  In Section 2 we recommended that OSPF packets
       be classified to "high" and "low" priority classes based on
       examining the OSPF packet header.  In some cases (particularly
       in the receiver) this examination may be computationally
       costly.  An alternative would be the
       use of different TOS/Precedence field settings for the two
       priority classes.  [Ref1] recommends setting the TOS field to 0
       and the Precedence field to 6 for all OSPF packets.  We recommend
       this same setting for the "low" priority OSPF packets and a
       different setting for the "high" priority OSPF packets in order
       to be able to classify them separately without having to examine
       the OSPF packet header.  Two examples are given below:

       Example 1: For "low" priority packets set TOS field to 0 and
                  Precedence field to 6, and for "high" priority
                  packets set TOS field to 4 and Precedence field to 6.

       Example 2: For "low" priority packets set TOS field to 0 and
                  Precedence field to 6, and for "high" priority
                  packets set TOS field to 0 and Precedence field to 7.

       It is to be noted that the TOS/Precedence bits have been
       redefined by Diffserv (RFC 2474, [Ref13]). It is also to be
       noted that the different TOS/Precedence field settings suggested
       above only need to be agreed among the systems on the link.
       This recommendation is not needed to be followed if it is easy
       to examine the OSPF packet header and thereby separately
       classify "high" and "low" priority packets.

   (2) Further Prioritization of OSPF Packets: Besides the packets
       designated as "high" priority in Recommendation 1 of Section 2
       there may be a need for further priority separation among the
       "low" priority OSPF packets.  We recommend the use of three
       priority classes: "high", "medium" and "low". While
       receiving a packet from a neighbor and while transmitting
       a packet to a neighbor, try to process a "high priority"
       packet ahead of "medium" and "low" priority packets and
       a "medium" priority packet ahead of "low priority" packets.
       The "high" priority packets are as designated in Recommendation
       1 of Section 2.  We provide below two candidate examples for
       "medium" priority packets.  All OSPF packets not designated
       as "high" or "medium" priority are "low" priority.



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       If Cryptographic Authentication (AuType = 2) is used (as
       specified in [Ref1]) then the receiver should maintain separate
       sequence numbers for OSPF packets belonging to different
       priority classes.

       One example of "medium" priority packet is the
       Database Description (DBD) packet from a slave (during the
       database synchronization process) that is used as an
       acknowledgment.

       A second example is an LSA carrying
       intra-area topology change information (this may trigger
       SPF calculation and rerouting of Label Switched paths and so
       fast processing of this packet may improve OSPF/LDP convergence
       times). However, if the processing cost of identifying and
       separately queueing the LSA in this example is deemed to be high
       then the implementor may decide not to do it.


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   Choudhury et. al.     Best Current Practice               [Page 14]