TCP Maintenance Working Group M. Mathis
Internet-Draft N. Dukkipati
Obsoletes: 6937 (if approved) Y. Cheng
Intended status: Standards Track Google, Inc.
Expires: 26 August 2021 22 February 2021
Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP
draft-ietf-tcpm-prr-rfc6937bis-01
Abstract
This document updates the experimental Proportional Rate Reduction
(PRR) algorithm, described RFC 6937, to standards track. PRR
potentially replaces the Fast Recovery and Rate-Halving algorithms.
All of these algorithms regulate the amount of data sent by TCP or
other transport protocol during loss recovery. PRR accurately
regulates the actual flight size through recovery such that at the
end of recovery it will be as close as possible to the ssthresh, as
determined by the congestion control algorithm.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 26 August 2021.
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document authors. All rights reserved.
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Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
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extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Document and WG Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Changes From RFC 6937 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Relationships to other standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
9. Adapting PRR to other transport protocols . . . . . . . . . . 14
10. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
11. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
12. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
13. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Appendix A. Strong Packet Conservation Bound . . . . . . . . . . 17
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1. Introduction
This document updates the Proportional Rate Reduction (PRR) algorithm
described in [RFC6937] from experimental to standards track. PRR
accuracy regulates the amount of data sent during loss recovery, such
that at the end of recovery the flight size will be as close as
possible to the ssthresh, as determined by the congestion control
algorithm. PRR has been deployed in at least 3 major operating
systems covering the vast majority of today's web traffic.
The only change from RFC 6937 is the introduction of a new heuristic
that replaces a manual configuration parameter. There have been no
changes to the behaviors of the algorithms or the previously
published results. The new heuristic only changes behaviors in
corner cases that were not relevant prior to the Lost Retransmission
Detection (LRD) algorithm which was not implemented until after RFC
6937 was published. This document also includes additional
discussion about integration into other congestion control and
recovery algorithms.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]
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1.1. Document and WG Information
Formatted: 2021-02-22 14:22:57-08:00
Please send all comments, questions and feedback to tcpm@ietf.org
About revision 00:
The introduction above was drawn from draft-mathis-tcpm-rfc6937bis-
00. All of the text below was copied verbatim from RFC 6937, to
facilitate comparison between RFC 6937 and this document as it
evolves.
About revision 01:
* Recast the RFC 6937 introduction as background
* Made "Changes From RFC 6937" an explicit section
* Made Relationships to other standards more explicit
* Added a generalized safeACK heuristic
* Provided hints for non TCP implementations
* Added language about detecting ACK splitting, but have no advice
on actions (yet)
2. Background
This section is copied almost verbatim from the introduction to RFC
6937.
Standard congestion control [RFC5681] requires that TCP (and other
protocols) reduce their congestion window (cwnd) in response to
losses. Fast Recovery, described in the same document, is the
reference algorithm for making this adjustment. Its stated goal is
to recover TCP's self clock by relying on returning ACKs during
recovery to clock more data into the network. Fast Recovery
typically adjusts the window by waiting for one half round-trip time
(RTT) of ACKs to pass before sending any data. It is fragile because
it cannot compensate for the implicit window reduction caused by the
losses themselves.
RFC 6675 [RFC6675] makes Fast Recovery with Selective Acknowledgement
(SACK) [RFC2018] more accurate by computing "pipe", a sender side
estimate of the number of bytes still outstanding in the network.
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With RFC 6675, Fast Recovery is implemented by sending data as
necessary on each ACK to prevent pipe from falling below slow-start
threshold (ssthresh), the window size as determined by the congestion
control algorithm. This protects Fast Recovery from timeouts in many
cases where there are heavy losses, although not if the entire second
half of the window of data or ACKs are lost. However, a single ACK
carrying a SACK option that implies a large quantity of missing data
can cause a step discontinuity in the pipe estimator, which can cause
Fast Retransmit to send a burst of data.
The Rate-Halving algorithm sends data on alternate ACKs during
recovery, such that after 1 RTT the window has been halved. Rate-
Halving was implemented in Linux after only being informally
published [RHweb], including an uncompleted document [RHID]. Rate-
Halving also does not adequately compensate for the implicit window
reduction caused by the losses and assumes a net 50% window
reduction, which was completely standard at the time it was written
but not appropriate for modern congestion control algorithms, such as
CUBIC [CUBIC], which reduce the window by less than 50%. As a
consequence, Rate-Halving often allows the window to fall further
than necessary, reducing performance and increasing the risk of
timeouts if there are additional losses.
PRR avoids these excess window adjustments such that at the end of
recovery the actual window size will be as close as possible to
ssthresh, the window size as determined by the congestion control
algorithm. It is patterned after Rate-Halving, but using the
fraction that is appropriate for the target window chosen by the
congestion control algorithm. During PRR, one of two additional
Reduction Bound algorithms limits the total window reduction due to
all mechanisms, including transient application stalls and the losses
themselves.
We describe two slightly different Reduction Bound algorithms:
Conservative Reduction Bound (CRB), which is strictly packet
conserving; and a Slow Start Reduction Bound (SSRB), which is more
aggressive than CRB by, at most, 1 segment per ACK. PRR-CRB meets
the Strong Packet Conservation Bound described in Appendix A;
however, in real networks it does not perform as well as the
algorithms described in RFC 6675, which prove to be more aggressive
in a significant number of cases. SSRB offers a compromise by
allowing TCP to send 1 additional segment per ACK relative to CRB in
some situations. Although SSRB is less aggressive than RFC 6675
(transmitting fewer segments or taking more time to transmit them),
it outperforms it, due to the lower probability of additional losses
during recovery.
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The Strong Packet Conservation Bound on which PRR and both Reduction
Bounds are based is patterned after Van Jacobson's packet
conservation principle: segments delivered to the receiver are used
as the clock to trigger sending the same number of segments back into
the network. As much as possible, PRR and the Reduction Bound
algorithms rely on this self clock process, and are only slightly
affected by the accuracy of other estimators, such as pipe [RFC6675]
and cwnd. This is what gives the algorithms their precision in the
presence of events that cause uncertainty in other estimators.
The original definition of the packet conservation principle
[Jacobson88] treated packets that are presumed to be lost (e.g.,
marked as candidates for retransmission) as having left the network.
This idea is reflected in the pipe estimator defined in RFC 6675 and
used here, but it is distinct from the Strong Packet Conservation
Bound as described in Appendix A, which is defined solely on the
basis of data arriving at the receiver.
3. Changes From RFC 6937
The largest change since RFC 6937 [RFC6937] is the introduction of a
new heuristic that uses good recovery progress (For TCP, snd.una
advances and no additional segments are marked as lost) to select
which Reduction Bound. RFC 6937 left the choice of Reduction Bound
to the discretion of the implementer but recommended to use BBR-SSRB
by default. For all of the environments explored in earlier PRR
research, the new heuristic is consistent with the old
recommendation.
The paper "An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing"
[Flach2016policing] uncovered a crucial situation, not previously
explored, where both Reduction Bounds perform very poorly, but for
different reasons. Under many configurations, token bucket traffic
policers [token_bucket] can suddenly start discarding a large
fraction of the traffic, without any warning to the end systems. The
transport congestion control has no opportunity to measure the token
rate, and sets ssthresh based on the previously observed path
performance. This value for ssthresh may result in a data rate that
is substantially larger than the token rate, causing persistent high
loss. Under these conditions, both reduction bounds perform very
poorly. PRR-CRB is too timid, sometimes causing very long recovery
times at smaller than necessary windows, and PRR-SSRB is too
aggressive, often causing many retransmissions to be lost multiple
times.
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Investigating these environments led to the development of a
"safeACK" heuristic to dynamically switch between Reduction Bounds:
use PRR-SSRB for ACKs reporting that the recovery is making good
progress (snd.una is advancing without any new losses) and PRR-CRB
otherwise
This heuristic is only invoked where application-limited behavior,
losses or other events cause the flight size to fall below ssthresh.
The extreme loss rates that make the heuristic important are only
common in the presence of token bucket policers, which are
pathologically wasteful and inefficient [Flach2016policing]. In
these environments the heuristic serves to salvage a bad situation
and any reasonable implementation of the heuristic performs far
better than either bound by itself. The heuristic has no effect
whatsoever in congestion events where there are no lost
retransmissions, including all of the examples described below and in
RFC 6937.
Since RFC 6937 was written, PRR has also been adapted to perform
multiplicative window reduction for non-loss based congestion control
algorithms, such as for RFC 3168 style ECN. This is typically done
by using some parts of the loss recovery state machine (in particular
the RecoveryPoint from RFC 6675) to invoke the PRR ACK processing for
exactly one round trip worth of ACKs.
For RFC 6937 we published a companion paper [IMC11] in which we
evaluated Fast Retransmit, Rate-Halving and various experimental PRR
versions in a large scale measurement study. Today, the legacy
algorithms used in that study have already faded from the code base,
making such comparisons impossible without recreating historical
algorithms. Readers interested in the measurement study should
review section 5 of RFC 6937 and the IMC paper [IMC11].
4. Relationships to other standards
PRR is described as modifications to "TCP Congestion Control"
[RFC5681], and "A Conservative Loss Recovery Algorithm Based on
Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) for TCP" [RFC6675]. It is most
accurate and more easily implemented with SACK [RFC2018], but does
not require SACK.
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The SafeACK heuristic came about as a consequence of robust Lost
Retransmission Detection under development in an early precursor to
[RACK]. Without LRD, policers that cause very high loss rates are
guaranteed to also cause retransmission timeouts because both RFC
5681 and RFC 6675 will send retransmissions above the policed rate.
PRR and the SafeACK heuristic were already well in place before the
RACK algorithm was fully matured. Note that there is no experience
implementing or testing RACK without PRR.
For this reason it is recommended that PRR is implemented with RACK.
5. Definitions
The following terms, parameters, and state variables are used as they
are defined in earlier documents:
RFC 793: snd.una (send unacknowledged).
RFC 5681: duplicate ACK, FlightSize, Sender Maximum Segment Size
(SMSS).
RFC 6675: covered (as in "covered sequence numbers").
Voluntary window reductions: choosing not to send data in response to
some ACKs, for the purpose of reducing the sending window size and
data rate.
We define some additional variables:
SACKd: The total number of bytes that the scoreboard indicates have
been delivered to the receiver. This can be computed by scanning the
scoreboard and counting the total number of bytes covered by all sack
blocks. If SACK is not in use, SACKd is not defined.
DeliveredData: The total number of bytes that the current ACK
indicates have been delivered to the receiver. With SACK,
DeliveredData can be computed precisely as the change in snd.una,
plus the (signed) change in SACKd. In recovery without SACK,
DeliveredData is estimated to be 1 SMSS on duplicate
acknowledgements, and on a subsequent partial or full ACK,
DeliveredData is estimated to be the change in snd.una, minus 1 SMSS
for each preceding duplicate ACK. If this calculation results in a
negative DeliveredData the data sender can infer that the receiver is
using a ACK splitting attack [and do what? @@@@]
Note that DeliveredData is robust; for TCP using SACK, DeliveredData
can be precisely computed anywhere along the return path by
inspecting the returning ACKs. The consequence of missing ACKs is
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that later ACKs will show a larger DeliveredData. Furthermore, for
any TCP (with or without SACK), the sum of DeliveredData must agree
with the forward progress over the same time interval.
safeACK: A local variable indicating that the current ACK reported
good progress -- snd.una advanced with no additional segments newly
marked lost.
sndcnt: A local variable indicating exactly how many bytes should be
sent in response to each ACK. Note that the decision of which data
to send (e.g., retransmit missing data or send more new data) is out
of scope for this document.
6. Algorithms
At the beginning of recovery, initialize PRR state. This assumes a
modern congestion control algorithm, CongCtrlAlg(), that might set
ssthresh to something other than FlightSize/2:
ssthresh = CongCtrlAlg() // Target cwnd after recovery
prr_delivered = 0 // Total bytes delivered during recovery
prr_out = 0 // Total bytes sent during recovery
RecoverFS = snd.nxt-snd.una // FlightSize at the start of recovery
Figure 1
On every ACK during recovery compute:
DeliveredData = change_in(snd.una) + change_in(SACKd)
prr_delivered += DeliveredData
pipe = (RFC 6675 pipe algorithm)
safeACK = (snd.una advances with no new losses)
if (pipe > ssthresh) {
// Proportional Rate Reduction
sndcnt = CEIL(prr_delivered * ssthresh / RecoverFS) - prr_out
} else {
// Two version of the reduction bound
if (safeACK) { // PRR+SSRB
limit = MAX(prr_delivered - prr_out, DeliveredData) + MSS
} else { // PRR+CRB
limit = prr_delivered - prr_out
}
// Attempt to catch up, as permitted by limit
sndcnt = MIN(ssthresh - pipe, limit)
}
Figure 2
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On any data transmission or retransmission:
prr_out += (data sent) // strictly less than or equal to sndcnt
Figure 3
7. Examples
We illustrate these algorithms by showing their different behaviors
for two scenarios: TCP experiencing either a single loss or a burst
of 15 consecutive losses. In all cases we assume bulk data (no
application pauses), standard Additive Increase Multiplicative
Decrease (AIMD) congestion control, and cwnd = FlightSize = pipe = 20
segments, so ssthresh will be set to 10 at the beginning of recovery.
We also assume standard Fast Retransmit and Limited Transmit
[RFC3042], so TCP will send 2 new segments followed by 1 retransmit
in response to the first 3 duplicate ACKs following the losses.
Each of the diagrams below shows the per ACK response to the first
round trip for the various recovery algorithms when the zeroth
segment is lost. The top line indicates the transmitted segment
number triggering the ACKs, with an X for the lost segment. "cwnd"
and "pipe" indicate the values of these algorithms after processing
each returning ACK. "Sent" indicates how much 'N'ew or
'R'etransmitted data would be sent. Note that the algorithms for
deciding which data to send are out of scope of this document.
We are including the Linux Rate_Halving implementation to illustrate
the state-of-the-art at the time, even though this algorithm is no
longer supported.
When there is a single loss, PRR with either of the Reduction Bound
algorithms has the same behavior. We show "RB", a flag indicating
which Reduction Bound subexpression ultimately determined the value
of sndcnt. When there are minimal losses, "limit" (both algorithms)
will always be larger than ssthresh - pipe, so the sndcnt will be
ssthresh - pipe, indicated by "s" in the "RB" row.
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RFC 6675
ack# X 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
cwnd: 20 20 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
pipe: 19 19 18 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10
sent: N N R N N N N N N N N
Rate-Halving (Historical Linux)
ack# X 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
cwnd: 20 20 19 18 18 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 13 13 12 12 11 11
pipe: 19 19 18 18 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 13 13 12 12 11 11 10
sent: N N R N N N N N N N N
PRR
ack# X 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
pipe: 19 19 18 18 18 17 17 16 16 15 15 14 14 13 13 12 12 11 10
sent: N N R N N N N N N N N
RB: s s
Cwnd is not shown because PRR does not use it.
Key for RB
s: sndcnt = ssthresh - pipe // from ssthresh
b: sndcnt = prr_delivered - prr_out + SMSS // from banked
d: sndcnt = DeliveredData + SMSS // from DeliveredData
(Sometimes, more than one applies.)
Figure 4
Note that all 3 algorithms send the same total amount of data. RFC
6675 experiences a "half window of silence", while the Rate-Halving
and PRR spread the voluntary window reduction across an entire RTT.
Next, we consider the same initial conditions when the first 15
packets (0-14) are lost. During the remainder of the lossy RTT, only
5 ACKs are returned to the sender. We examine each of these
algorithms in succession.
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RFC 6675
ack# X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 15 16 17 18 19
cwnd: 20 20 11 11 11
pipe: 19 19 4 10 10
sent: N N 7R R R
Rate-Halving (Historical Linux)
ack# X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 15 16 17 18 19
cwnd: 20 20 5 5 5
pipe: 19 19 4 4 4
sent: N N R R R
PRR-CRB
ack# X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 15 16 17 18 19
pipe: 19 19 4 4 4
sent: N N R R R
RB: b b b
PRR-SSRB
ack# X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 15 16 17 18 19
pipe: 19 19 4 5 6
sent: N N 2R 2R 2R
RB: bd d d
Figure 5
In this specific situation, RFC 6675 is more aggressive because once
Fast Retransmit is triggered (on the ACK for segment 17), TCP
immediately retransmits sufficient data to bring pipe up to cwnd.
Our earlier measurements [RFC 6937 section 6] indicates that RFC 6675
significantly outperforms Rate-Halving, PRR-CRB, and some other
similarly conservative algorithms that we tested, showing that it is
significantly common for the actual losses to exceed the window
reduction determined by the congestion control algorithm.
The Linux implementation of Rate-Halving included an early version of
the Conservative Reduction Bound [RHweb]. With this algorithm, the 5
ACKs trigger exactly 1 transmission each (2 new data, 3 old data),
and cwnd is set to 5. At a window size of 5, it takes 3 round trips
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to retransmit all 15 lost segments. Rate-Halving does not raise the
window at all during recovery, so when recovery finally completes,
TCP will slow start cwnd from 5 up to 10. In this example, TCP
operates at half of the window chosen by the congestion control for
more than 3 RTTs, increasing the elapsed time and exposing it to
timeouts in the event that there are additional losses.
PRR-CRB implements a Conservative Reduction Bound. Since the total
losses bring pipe below ssthresh, data is sent such that the total
data transmitted, prr_out, follows the total data delivered to the
receiver as reported by returning ACKs. Transmission is controlled
by the sending limit, which is set to prr_delivered - prr_out. This
is indicated by the RB:b tagging in the figure. In this case, PRR-
CRB is exposed to exactly the same problems as Rate-Halving; the
excess window reduction causes it to take excessively long to recover
the losses and exposes it to additional timeouts.
PRR-SSRB increases the window by exactly 1 segment per ACK until pipe
rises to ssthresh during recovery. This is accomplished by setting
limit to one greater than the data reported to have been delivered to
the receiver on this ACK, implementing slow start during recovery,
and indicated by RB:d tagging in the figure. Although increasing the
window during recovery seems to be ill advised, it is important to
remember that this is actually less aggressive than permitted by RFC
5681, which sends the same quantity of additional data as a single
burst in response to the ACK that triggered Fast Retransmit.
For less extreme events, where the total losses are smaller than the
difference between FlightSize and ssthresh, PRR-CRB and PRR-SSRB have
identical behaviors.
8. Properties
The following properties are common to both PRR-CRB and PRR-SSRB,
except as noted:
PRR maintains TCP's ACK clocking across most recovery events,
including burst losses. RFC 6675 can send large unclocked bursts
following burst losses.
Normally, PRR will spread voluntary window reductions out evenly
across a full RTT. This has the potential to generally reduce the
burstiness of Internet traffic, and could be considered to be a type
of soft pacing. Hypothetically, any pacing increases the probability
that different flows are interleaved, reducing the opportunity for
ACK compression and other phenomena that increase traffic burstiness.
However, these effects have not been quantified.
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If there are minimal losses, PRR will converge to exactly the target
window chosen by the congestion control algorithm. Note that as TCP
approaches the end of recovery, prr_delivered will approach RecoverFS
and sndcnt will be computed such that prr_out approaches ssthresh.
Implicit window reductions, due to multiple isolated losses during
recovery, cause later voluntary reductions to be skipped. For small
numbers of losses, the window size ends at exactly the window chosen
by the congestion control algorithm.
For burst losses, earlier voluntary window reductions can be undone
by sending extra segments in response to ACKs arriving later during
recovery. Note that as long as some voluntary window reductions are
not undone, the final value for pipe will be the same as ssthresh,
the target cwnd value chosen by the congestion control algorithm.
PRR with either Reduction Bound improves the situation when there are
application stalls, e.g., when the sending application does not queue
data for transmission quickly enough or the receiver stops advancing
rwnd (receiver window). When there is an application stall early
during recovery, prr_out will fall behind the sum of the
transmissions permitted by sndcnt. The missed opportunities to send
due to stalls are treated like banked voluntary window reductions;
specifically, they cause prr_delivered - prr_out to be significantly
positive. If the application catches up while TCP is still in
recovery, TCP will send a partial window burst to catch up to exactly
where it would have been had the application never stalled. Although
this burst might be viewed as being hard on the network, this is
exactly what happens every time there is a partial RTT application
stall while not in recovery. We have made the partial RTT stall
behavior uniform in all states. Changing this behavior is out of
scope for this document.
PRR with Reduction Bound is less sensitive to errors in the pipe
estimator. While in recovery, pipe is intrinsically an estimator,
using incomplete information to estimate if un-SACKed segments are
actually lost or merely out of order in the network. Under some
conditions, pipe can have significant errors; for example, pipe is
underestimated when a burst of reordered data is prematurely assumed
to be lost and marked for retransmission. If the transmissions are
regulated directly by pipe as they are with RFC 6675, a step
discontinuity in the pipe estimator causes a burst of data, which
cannot be retracted once the pipe estimator is corrected a few ACKs
later. For PRR, pipe merely determines which algorithm, PRR or the
Reduction Bound, is used to compute sndcnt from DeliveredData. While
pipe is underestimated, the algorithms are different by at most 1
segment per ACK. Once pipe is updated, they converge to the same
final window at the end of recovery.
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Under all conditions and sequences of events during recovery, PRR-CRB
strictly bounds the data transmitted to be equal to or less than the
amount of data delivered to the receiver. We claim that this Strong
Packet Conservation Bound is the most aggressive algorithm that does
not lead to additional forced losses in some environments. It has
the property that if there is a standing queue at a bottleneck with
no cross traffic, the queue will maintain exactly constant length for
the duration of the recovery, except for +1/-1 fluctuation due to
differences in packet arrival and exit times. See Appendix A for a
detailed discussion of this property.
Although the Strong Packet Conservation Bound is very appealing for a
number of reasons, our earlier measurements [RFC 6937 section 6]
demonstrate that it is less aggressive and does not perform as well
as RFC 6675, which permits bursts of data when there are bursts of
losses. PRR-SSRB is a compromise that permits TCP to send 1 extra
segment per ACK as compared to the Packet Conserving Bound. From the
perspective of a strict Packet Conserving Bound, PRR-SSRB does indeed
open the window during recovery; however, it is significantly less
aggressive than RFC 6675 in the presence of burst losses.
9. Adapting PRR to other transport protocols
The main PRR algorithm and reductions bounds can be adapted to any
transport that can support RFC 6675.
The safeACK heuristic can be generalized as any ACK of a
retransmission that does not cause some other segment to be marked
for retransmission. That is, PRR_SSRB is safe on any ACK that
reduces the total number of pending and outstanding retransmissions.
10. Acknowledgements
This document is based in part on previous incomplete work by Matt
Mathis, Jeff Semke, and Jamshid Mahdavi [RHID] and influenced by
several discussions with John Heffner.
Monia Ghobadi and Sivasankar Radhakrishnan helped analyze the
experiments.
Ilpo Jarvinen reviewed the code.
Mark Allman improved the document through his insightful review.
Neal Cardwell for reviewing and testing the patch.
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11. Security Considerations
PRR does not change the risk profile for TCP.
Implementers that change PRR from counting bytes to segments have to
be cautious about the effects of ACK splitting attacks [Savage99],
where the receiver acknowledges partial segments for the purpose of
confusing the sender's congestion accounting.
12. Normative References
[RFC0793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
RFC 793, DOI 10.17487/RFC0793, September 1981,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc793>.
[RFC2018] Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., and A. Romanow, "TCP
Selective Acknowledgment Options", RFC 2018,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2018, October 1996,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2018>.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC5681] Allman, M., Paxson, V., and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion
Control", RFC 5681, DOI 10.17487/RFC5681, September 2009,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5681>.
[RFC6675] Blanton, E., Allman, M., Wang, L., Jarvinen, I., Kojo, M.,
and Y. Nishida, "A Conservative Loss Recovery Algorithm
Based on Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) for TCP",
RFC 6675, DOI 10.17487/RFC6675, August 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6675>.
13. Informative References
[CUBIC] Rhee, I. and L. Xu, "CUBIC: A new TCP-friendly high-speed
TCP variant", PFLDnet 2005, February 2005.
[FACK] Mathis, M. and J. Mahdavi, "Forward Acknowledgment:
Refining TCP Congestion Control", ACM SIGCOMM SIGCOMM96,
August 1996.
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[Flach2016policing]
Flach, T., Papageorge, P., Terzis, A., Pedrosa, L., Cheng,
Y., Al Karim, T., Katz-Bassett, E., and R. Govindan, "An
Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing", ACM
SIGCOMM SIGCOMM2016, August 2016.
[IMC11] Dukkipati, N., Mathis, M., Cheng, Y., and M. Ghobadi,
"Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP", Proceedings of the
11th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement
2011, Berlin, Germany, November 2011.
[Jacobson88]
Jacobson, V., "Congestion Avoidance and Control", SIGCOMM
Comput. Commun. Rev. 18(4), August 1988.
[Laminar] Mathis, M., "Laminar TCP and the case for refactoring TCP
congestion control", Work in Progress, 16 July 2012.
[RFC3042] Allman, M., Balakrishnan, H., and S. Floyd, "Enhancing
TCP's Loss Recovery Using Limited Transmit", RFC 3042,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3042, January 2001,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3042>.
[RFC3517] Blanton, E., Allman, M., Fall, K., and L. Wang, "A
Conservative Selective Acknowledgment (SACK)-based Loss
Recovery Algorithm for TCP", RFC 3517,
DOI 10.17487/RFC3517, April 2003,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3517>.
[RFC6937] Mathis, M., Dukkipati, N., and Y. Cheng, "Proportional
Rate Reduction for TCP", RFC 6937, DOI 10.17487/RFC6937,
May 2013, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6937>.
[RHID] Mathis, M., Semke, J., and J. Mahdavi, "The Rate-Halving
Algorithm for TCP Congestion Control", Work in Progress,
August 1999.
[RHweb] Mathis, M. and J. Mahdavi, "TCP Rate-Halving with Bounding
Parameters", Web publication, December 1997,
<http://www.psc.edu/networking/papers/FACKnotes/current/>.
[Savage99] Savage, S., Cardwell, N., Wetherall, D., and T. Anderson,
"TCP congestion control with a misbehaving receiver",
SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 29(5), October 1999.
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Appendix A. Strong Packet Conservation Bound
PRR-CRB is based on a conservative, philosophically pure, and
aesthetically appealing Strong Packet Conservation Bound, described
here. Although inspired by the packet conservation principle
[Jacobson88], it differs in how it treats segments that are missing
and presumed lost. Under all conditions and sequences of events
during recovery, PRR-CRB strictly bounds the data transmitted to be
equal to or less than the amount of data delivered to the receiver.
Note that the effects of presumed losses are included in the pipe
calculation, but do not affect the outcome of PRR-CRB, once pipe has
fallen below ssthresh.
We claim that this Strong Packet Conservation Bound is the most
aggressive algorithm that does not lead to additional forced losses
in some environments. It has the property that if there is a
standing queue at a bottleneck that is carrying no other traffic, the
queue will maintain exactly constant length for the entire duration
of the recovery, except for +1/-1 fluctuation due to differences in
packet arrival and exit times. Any less aggressive algorithm will
result in a declining queue at the bottleneck. Any more aggressive
algorithm will result in an increasing queue or additional losses if
it is a full drop tail queue.
We demonstrate this property with a little thought experiment:
Imagine a network path that has insignificant delays in both
directions, except for the processing time and queue at a single
bottleneck in the forward path. By insignificant delay, we mean when
a packet is "served" at the head of the bottleneck queue, the
following events happen in much less than one bottleneck packet time:
the packet arrives at the receiver; the receiver sends an ACK that
arrives at the sender; the sender processes the ACK and sends some
data; the data is queued at the bottleneck.
If sndcnt is set to DeliveredData and nothing else is inhibiting
sending data, then clearly the data arriving at the bottleneck queue
will exactly replace the data that was served at the head of the
queue, so the queue will have a constant length. If queue is drop
tail and full, then the queue will stay exactly full. Losses or
reordering on the ACK path only cause wider fluctuations in the queue
size, but do not raise its peak size, independent of whether the data
is in order or out of order (including loss recovery from an earlier
RTT). Any more aggressive algorithm that sends additional data will
overflow the drop tail queue and cause loss. Any less aggressive
algorithm will under-fill the queue. Therefore, setting sndcnt to
DeliveredData is the most aggressive algorithm that does not cause
forced losses in this simple network. Relaxing the assumptions
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(e.g., making delays more authentic and adding more flows, delayed
ACKs, etc.) is likely to increase the fine grained fluctuations in
queue size but does not change its basic behavior.
Note that the congestion control algorithm implements a broader
notion of optimal that includes appropriately sharing the network.
Typical congestion control algorithms are likely to reduce the data
sent relative to the Packet Conserving Bound implemented by PRR,
bringing TCP's actual window down to ssthresh.
Authors' Addresses
Matt Mathis
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, California 94043
United States of America
Email: mattmathis@google.com
Nandita Dukkipati
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, California 94043
United States of America
Email: nanditad@google.com
Yuchung Cheng
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, California 94043
United States of America
Email: ycheng@google.com
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