Network Working Group Y. Nishida
Internet-Draft GE Global Research
Intended status: Standards Track P. Natarajan
Expires: April 26, 2015 Cisco Systems
A. Caro
BBN Technologies
P. Amer
University of Delaware
K. Nielsen
Ericsson
October 23, 2014
Quick Failover Algorithm in SCTP
draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctp-failover-07.txt
Abstract
One of the major advantages of SCTP is that it supports multi-homed
communication. A multi-homed SCTP end-point has the ability to
withstand network failures by migrating the traffic from an inactive
network to an active one. However, if the [RFC4960] specified
failover operation is followed there can be a significant delay in
the migration to the active destination addresses, thus severely
reducing the effectiveness of SCTP multi-homed operation.
The memo complements RFC4960 by the introduction of the Potentially
Failed state and associated new Quick Failover operation to apply
during network failure and specifies for SCTP senders to support this
more performance optimal failover procedure as an add-on to the
[RFC4960] failover operation. The memo in addition complements
[RFC4960] by introduction of alternative switchover operation modes
for the data transfer path management after a failover. These
operation modes offer for more performance optimal operation in some
network environments. From the perspective of this memo the
implementation of the additional switchover operation modes is
considered optional.
The procedures defined require only minimal modifications to the
current specification. The procedures are sender-side only and do
not impact the SCTP receiver.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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This Internet-Draft will expire on April 26, 2015.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2014 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
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the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Conventions and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Issues with the SCTP Path Management . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. SCTP with Potentially-Failed Destination State (SCTP-PF) . . 5
4.1. SCTP-PF Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.2. SCTP-PF Algorithm Detail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.3. Optional Feature: Permanent Failover . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. Socket API Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.1. Support for the Potentially Failed Path State . . . . . . 11
5.2. Peer Address Thresholds (SCTP_PEER_ADDR_THLDS) Socket
Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.3. Exposing the Potentially Failed Path State
(SCTP_EXPOSE_POTENTIALLY_FAILED_STATE) Socket Option . . 13
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
8. Proposed Change of Status (to be Deleted before Publication) 14
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
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Appendix A. Discussions of Alternative Approaches . . . . . . . 15
A.1. Reduce Path.Max.Retrans (PMR) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
A.2. Adjust RTO related parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Appendix B. Discussions for Path Bouncing Effect . . . . . . . . 16
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1. Introduction
The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) as specified in
[RFC4960] supports multihoming at the transport layer -- an SCTP
association can bind to multiple IP addresses at each endpoint.
SCTP's multihoming features include failure detection and failover
procedures to provide network interface redundancy and improved end-
to-end fault tolerance.
In SCTP's current failure detection procedure, the sender must
experience Path.Max.Retrans (PMR) number of consecutive failed
retransmissions on a destination before detecting a path failure.
The sender fails over to an alternate active destination only after
failure detection. Until detecting the failover, the sender
continues to transmit data on the failed path, which degrades the
SCTP performance. Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) [IYENGAR06] is
an extension to SCTP and allows the sender to transmit data on
multiple paths simultaneously. Research [NATARAJAN09] shows that the
current failure detection procedure worsens CMT performance during
failover and can be significantly improved by employing a better
failover algorithm.
This document specifies an alternative failure detection procedure
for SCTP that improves the SCTP performance during a failover.
Also the operation after a failover impacts the performance of the
protocol. With [RFC4960] procedures, SCTP will, after a failover
from the primary path, switch back to use the primary path for data
transfer as soon as this path becomes available. From a performance
perspective, as confirmed in research [CARO02], such a switchback of
the data transmission path is not optimal in general. As an optional
alternative to the switchback operation of [RFC4960], this document
specifies for SCTP to support the Permanent Failover switchover
procedures proposed by [CARO02]. Additional discussions for
alternative approach that does not require modifications to [RFC4960]
and path bouncing effects that might be caused by frequent switchover
are provided in Appendix.
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2. Conventions and Terminology
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].
3. Issues with the SCTP Path Management
This section describes issues in the current SCTP to be fixed by the
approach described in this document.
SCTP can utilize multiple IP addresses for a single SCTP association.
Each SCTP endpoint exchanges the list of its usable addresses during
initial negotiation with its peer. Then the endpoints select one
address from the peer's list and define this as the primary
destination. During normal transmission, SCTP sends all user data to
the primary destination. Also, it sends heartbeat packets to all
idle destinations at a certain interval to check the reachability of
the path. Idle destinations normally include all non-primary
destinations.
If a sender has multiple active destination addresses, it can
retransmit data to secondary destination address, when the
transmission to the primary times out.
When a sender receives an acknowledgment for DATA or HEARTBEAT chunks
sent to one of the destination addresses, it considers that
destination to be active. If it fails to receive acknowledgments,
the error count for the address is increased. If the error counter
exceeds the protocol parameter 'Path.Max.Retrans', SCTP endpoint
considers the address to be inactive.
The failover process of SCTP is initiated when the primary path
becomes inactive (error counter for the primary path exceeds
Path.Max.Retrans). If the primary path is marked inactive, SCTP
chooses a new destination address from one of the active destinations
and start using this address to send data to. If the primary path
becomes active again, SCTP uses the primary destination for
subsequent data transmissions and stop using non-primary one.
One issue with this failover process is that it usually takes
significant amount of time before SCTP switches to the new
destination. Let's say the primary path on a multi-homed host
becomes unavailable and the RTO value for the primary path at that
time is around 1 second, it usually takes over 60 seconds before SCTP
starts to use the secondary path. This is because the recommended
value for Path.Max.Retrans in the standard is 5, which requires 6
consecutive timeouts before failover takes place. Before SCTP
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switches to the secondary address, SCTP keeps trying to send packets
to the primary and only retransmitted packets are sent to the
secondary and can thus be reached at the receiver. This slow
failover process can cause significant performance degradation and
will not be acceptable in some situations.
Another issue is that once the primary path is active again, the
traffic is switched back. This is not optimal in some situations.
This is further discussed in Section 4.3.
4. SCTP with Potentially-Failed Destination State (SCTP-PF)
To address the issues described in Section 3, this section updates
SCTP path management scheme with the Potentially Failed state and
associated Quick Failover operation. We use the term SCTP-PF to
denote the resulting SCTP path management operation.
4.1. SCTP-PF Concept
SCTP-PF as defined stems from the following two observations about
SCTP's failure detection procedure:
o To minimize performance impact during failover, the sender should
avoid transmitting data to the failed destination as early as
possible. In the current SCTP path management scheme, the sender
stops transmitting data to a destination only after the
destination is marked Failed (inactive). Thus, a smaller PMR
value is ideal so that the sender transitions a destination to the
Failed (inactive) state quicker.
o Smaller PMR values increase the chances of spurious failure
detection where the sender incorrectly marks a destination as
Failed (inactive) during periods of temporary congestion. As
[RFC4960] recommends for a coupling of the PMR value and the AMR
value such spurious failure detection risks to carry over to
spurious association failure detection and closure. Larger PMR
values are preferable to avoid spurious failure detection.
From the above observations it is clear that tuning the PMR value
involves the following tradeoff -- a lower value improves performance
but increases the chances of spurious failure detection, whereas a
higher value degrades performance and reduces spurious failure
detection in a wide range of path conditions. Thus, tuning the
association's PMR value is an incomplete solution to address
performance impact during failure.
This new method introduces a new "Potentially-Failed" (PF)
destination state in SCTP's path management procedure. The PF state
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was originally proposed to improve CMT performance [NATARAJAN09].
The PF state is an intermediate state between Active and Failed
states. SCTP's failure detection procedure is modified to include
the PF state. The new failure detection algorithm assumes that loss
detected by a timeout implies either severe congestion or failure en-
route. After a number of consecutive timeouts on a path, the sender
is unsure, and marks the corresponding destination as PF. A PF
destination is not used for data transmission except in special cases
(discussed below). The new failure detection algorithm requires only
sender-side changes.
4.2. SCTP-PF Algorithm Detail
SCTP PF operation is specified as follows:
1. The sender maintains a new tunable parameter called Potentially-
Failed.Max.Retrans (PFMR). The RECOMMENDED value of PFMR = 0
when Quick Failover is used. When PFMR is larger or equal to
PMR, Quick Failover is turned off.
2. The error counter of an active destination address is
incremented as specified in [RFC4960]. This means that the
error counter of the destination address will be incremented
each time the T3-rtx timer expires, or at times where a
HEARTBEAT sent to an idle, active address is not acknowledged
within an RTO. When the value in the destination address error
counter exceeds PFMR, the endpoint MUST mark the destination
transport address as PF.
3. The sender SHOULD avoid data transmission to PF destinations.
When the destinations are all in PF state or some in PF state
and some in inactive state, the sender MUST choose one
destination in PF state and transmit data to this destination.
The sender SHOULD choose the destination in PF state with the
lowest error count (fewest consecutive timeouts) for data
transmission and transmit data to this destination. When there
are multiple PF destinations with same error count, the sender
SHOULD let the choice among the multiple PF destination with
equal error count be based on the [RFC4960], section 6.4.1,
principles of choosing most divergent source-destination pairs
when executing (potentially consecutive) retransmission. This
means that the sender SHOULD attempt to pick the most divergent
source - destination pair from the last source - destination
pair on which data were transmitted or retransmitted. Rules for
picking the most divergent source-destination pair are an
implementation decision and are not specified within this
document. A sender may choose to deploy other strategies than
the above when choosing among multiple PF destinations with
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equal error count. In all cases the sender MUST NOT change the
state of chosen destination and it MUST NOT clear the
destination's error counter as a result of choosing the
destination for data transmission.
4. Heartbeats SHOULD be sent to PF destination(s) once per RTO.
This means the sender MUST ignore HB.interval for PF
destinations. If an heartbeat is unanswered, the sender SHOULD
increment the error counter and exponentially back off the RTO
value. If error counter is less than PMR, the sender SHOULD
transmit another heartbeat immediately after T3-timer
expiration. When data is transmitted to a PF destination, the
transmission of heartbeats may be omitted as SACK or T3-rtx
timer expiration can provide equivalent information. It is
RECOMMENDED that heartbeats be send to PF destinations
regardless of whether the Path Heartbeat function (Section 8.3
of [RFC4960]) is enabled for the destination address or not.
5. When the sender receives an heartbeat ACK from a PF destination,
the sender MUST clear the destination's error counter and
transition the PF destination back to Active state. When the
sender resumes data transmission on the destination it MUST do
this following the prescriptions of Section 7.2 of [RFC4960].
6. Additional (PMR - PFMR) consecutive timeouts on a PF destination
confirm the path failure, upon which the destination transitions
to the Inactive state. As described in [RFC4960], the sender
(i) SHOULD notify ULP about this state transition, and (ii)
transmit heartbeats to the Inactive destination at a lower
frequency as described in Section 8.3 of [RFC4960] (when this
function is enabled for the destination address).
7. When all destinations are in inactive state (association dormant
state) the sender MUST also choose one destination to transmit
data to. The sender SHOULD choose the destination in inactive
state with the lowest error count (fewest consecutive timeouts)
for data transmission and transmit data to this destination.
When there are multiple destinations with same error count in
inactive state, the sender SHOULD attempt to pick the most
divergent source - destination pair from the last source -
destination pair on which data were transmitted or retransmitted
following [RFC4960]. Rules for picking the most divergent
source-destination pair are an implementation decision and are
not specified within this document. Therefore, a sender SHOULD
allow for incrementing the destination error counters up to some
reasonable limit larger than PMR+1, thus changing the
prescriptions of [RFC4960], section 8.3, in this respect. The
exact limit to apply is not specified in this document but it is
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considered reasonable to require for such to be an order of
magnitude higher than the PMR value. A sender MAY choose to
deploy other strategies than the above. For example, a sender
could choose to prioritize the last active destination during
dormant state. The strategy to prioritize the last active
destination is optimal when some paths are permanently inactive,
but suboptimal when paths' instability is transient. While the
increment of the error counters above PMR+1 is a prerequisite
for the error counter values to serve to guide the path
selection in dormant state, then it is noted that by virtue of
the introduction of the Potentially Failed state, one may deploy
higher values of PMR without compromising the efficiency of the
failover operation, and thus making the increase of path error
counters above PMR+1 less critical as the dormant state will be
less likely to happen. The downside of increasing the PMR value
relative to the AMR value, however, is that the per destination
address failure detection and notification of such to ULP
thereby is weakened. In all cases the sender MUST NOT change
the state of the chosen destination and it MUST NOT clear the
destination's error counter as a result of choosing the
destination for data transmission.
8. ACKs for chunks that have been transmitted to multiple
destinations (i.e., a chunk which has been retransmitted to a
different destination than the destination to which the chunk
was first transmitted) SHOULD NOT clear the error count of an
inactive destination and SHOULD NOT transition a PF destination
back to Active state, since a sender cannot disambiguate whether
the ACK was for the original transmission or the
retransmission(s). The same ambiguity concerns the related
congestion window growth. The bytes of a newly acknowledged
chunk which has been transmitted to multiple destinations SHOULD
be considered for contribution to the congestion window growth
towards the destination where the chunk was last sent. The
contribution of the acked bytes to the window growth is subject
to the prescriptions described in Section 7.2 of [RFC4960] is
fulfilled. A SCTP sender MAY apply a different approach for
both the error count handling and the congestion control growth
handling based on unequivocally information on which destination
(including multiple destinations) the chunk reached. This
document makes no reference to what such unequivocally
information could consist of, neither how such unequivocally
information could be obtained. The implementation of such an
alternative approach is left to implementations.
9. ACKs for chunks which has been transmitted to one destination
address only MUST clear the error counter of the destination
address and MUST transition a PF destination back to Active
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state. This situation can happen when new data is sent to a
destination address in PF state. It can also happen in
situations where the destination address is in PF state due to
the occurrence of a spurious T3-rtx timer and ACKs start to
arrive for data sent prior to occurrence of the spurious T3-rtx
and data has not yet been retransmitted towards other
destinations. This document does not specify special handling
for detection of or reaction to spurious T3-rtx timeouts, e.g.,
for special operation vis-a-vis the congestion control handling
or data retransmission operation towards a destination address
which undergoes a transition from active to PF to active state
due to a spurious T3-rtx timeout. But it is noted that this is
an area which would benefit from additional attention,
experimentation and specification for Single Homed SCTP as well
as for Multi Homed SCTP protocol operation.
10. SCTP stack SHOULD provide the ULP with the means to expose the
PF state of its destinations as well as the means to notify the
state transitions from Active to PF, and vice-versa. When doing
this, such SCTP stack MUST provide the ULP with the means to
suppress exposure of PF state and association state transitions
as well.
4.3. Optional Feature: Permanent Failover
In [RFC4960], an SCTP sender migrates the traffic back to the
original primary destination once this destination becomes active
again. As the CWND towards the original primary destination has to
be rebuilt once data transfer resumes, the switch back to use the
original primary path is not always optimal. Indeed [CARO02] shows
that the switch back to the original primary may degrade SCTP
performance compared to continuing data transmission on the same
path, especially, but not only, in scenarios where this path's
characteristics are better. In order to mitigate this performance
degradation, Permanent Failover operation was proposed in [CARO02].
When SCTP changes the destination due to failover, Permanent Failover
operation allows SCTP sender to continue data transmission on the new
working path even if the old primary destination becomes active
again. This is achieved by having SCTP perform a switch over of the
primary path to the alternative working path rather than having SCTP
switch back data transfer to the (previous) primary path.
The manner of switch over operation that is most optimal in a given
scenario depends on the relative quality of a set primary path versus
the quality of alternative paths available as well as it depends on
the extent to which it is desired for the mode of operation to
enforce traffic distribution over a number of network paths. I.e.,
load distribution of traffic from multiple SCTP associations may be
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sought to be enforced by distribution of the set primary paths with
[RFC4960] switchback operation. However as [RFC4960] switchback
behavior is suboptimal in certain situations, especially in scenarios
where a number of equally good paths are available, it is recommended
for SCTP to support also, as alternative behavior, the Permanent
Failover switch over modes of operation.
The Permanent Failover operation requires only sender side changes.
The details are:
1. The sender maintains a new tunable parameter, called
Primary.Switchover.Max.Retrans (PSMR). The PSMR MUST be set
greater or equal to the PFMR value. Implementations MUST reject
any other values of PSMR.
2. When the path error counter on a set primary path exceeds PSMR,
the SCTP implementation MUST autonomously select and set a new
primary path.
3. The primary path selected by the SCTP implementation MUST be the
path which at the given time would be chosen for data transfer.
A previously failed primary path MAY come in use as data transfer
path as per normal path selection when the present data transfer
path fails.
4. The recommended value of PSMR is PFMR when Permanent Failover is
used. This means that no forced switchback to a previously
failed primary path is performed. An implementation of Permanent
Failover MUST support the setting of PSMR = PFMR. An
implementation of Permanent Failover MAY support setting of PSMR
> PFMR.
5. It MUST be possible to disable the Permanent Failover and obtain
the standard switchback operation of [RFC4960].
This specifications RECOMMENDS a default configuration that uses
standard RFC4960 switchback, i.e., switch back to the old primary
destination once the destination becomes active again. However, to
support optimal operation in a wider range of network scenarios, an
implementation MAY implement Permanent Failover operation as detailed
above and MAY enable it based on network configurations or users'
requests.
5. Socket API Considerations
This section describes how the socket API defined in [RFC6458] is
extended to provide a way for the application to control and observe
the quick failover behavior.
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Please note that this section is informational only.
A socket API implementation based on [RFC6458] is, by means of the
existing SCTP_PEER_ADDR_CHANGE event, extended to provide the event
notification when a peer address enters or leaves the potentially
failed state as well as the socket API implementation is extended to
expose the potentially failed state of a peer address in the existing
SCTP_GET_PEER_ADDR_INFO structure.
Furthermore, two new read/write socket options for the level
IPPROTO_SCTP and the name SCTP_PEER_ADDR_THLDS and
SCTP_EXPOSE_POTENTIALLY_FAILED_STATE are defined as described below.
The first socket option is used to control the values of the PFMR and
PSMR parameters described in Section 4. The second one controls the
exposition of the potentially failed path state.
Support for the SCTP_PEER_ADDR_THLDS and
SCTP_EXPOSE_POTENTIALLY_FAILED_STATE socket options need also to be
added to the function sctp_opt_info().
5.1. Support for the Potentially Failed Path State
As defined in [RFC6458], the SCTP_PEER_ADDR_CHANGE event is provided
if the status of a peer address changes. In addition to the state
changes described in [RFC6458], this event is also provided, if a
peer address enters or leaves the potentially failed state. The
notification as defined in [RFC6458] uses the following structure:
struct sctp_paddr_change {
uint16_t spc_type;
uint16_t spc_flags;
uint32_t spc_length;
struct sockaddr_storage spc_aaddr;
uint32_t spc_state;
uint32_t spc_error;
sctp_assoc_t spc_assoc_id;
}
[RFC6458] defines the constants SCTP_ADDR_AVAILABLE,
SCTP_ADDR_UNREACHABLE, SCTP_ADDR_REMOVED, SCTP_ADDR_ADDED, and
SCTP_ADDR_MADE_PRIM to be provided in the spc_state field. This
document defines in addition to that the new constant
SCTP_ADDR_POTENTIALLY_FAILED, which is reported if the affected
address becomes potentially failed.
The SCTP_GET_PEER_ADDR_INFO socket option defined in [RFC6458] can be
used to query the state of a peer address. It uses the following
structure:
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struct sctp_paddrinfo {
sctp_assoc_t spinfo_assoc_id;
struct sockaddr_storage spinfo_address;
int32_t spinfo_state;
uint32_t spinfo_cwnd;
uint32_t spinfo_srtt;
uint32_t spinfo_rto;
uint32_t spinfo_mtu;
};
[RFC6458] defines the constants SCTP_UNCONFIRMED, SCTP_ACTIVE, and
SCTP_INACTIVE to be provided in the spinfo_state field. This
document defines in addition to that the new constant
SCTP_POTENTIALLY_FAILED, which is reported if the peer address is
potentially failed.
5.2. Peer Address Thresholds (SCTP_PEER_ADDR_THLDS) Socket Option
Applications can control the quick failover behavior by getting or
setting the number of consecutive timeouts before a peer address is
considered potentially failed or unreachable and before the primary
path is changed automatically. This socket option uses the level
IPPROTO_SCTP and the name SCTP_PEER_ADDR_THLDS.
The following structure is used to access and modify the thresholds:
struct sctp_paddrthlds {
sctp_assoc_t spt_assoc_id;
struct sockaddr_storage spt_address;
uint16_t spt_pathmaxrxt;
uint16_t spt_pathpfthld;
uint16_t spt_pathcpthld;
};
spt_assoc_id: This parameter is ignored for one-to-one style
sockets. For one-to-many style sockets the application may fill
in an association identifier or SCTP_FUTURE_ASSOC. It is an error
to use SCTP_{CURRENT|ALL}_ASSOC in spt_assoc_id.
spt_address: This specifies which peer address is of interest. If a
wildcard address is provided, this socket option applies to all
current and future peer addresses.
spt_pathmaxrxt: Each peer address of interest is considered
unreachable, if its path error counter exceeds spt_pathmaxrxt.
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spt_pathpfthld: Each peer address of interest is considered
potentially failed, if its path error counter exceeds
spt_pathpfthld.
spt_pathcpthld: Each peer address of interest is not considered the
primary remote address anymore, if its path error counter exceeds
spt_pathcpthld. Using a value of 0xffff disables the selection of
a new primary peer address. If an implementation does not support
the automatically selection of a new primary address, it should
indicate an error with errno set to EINVAL if a value different
from 0xffff is used in spt_pathcpthld. Setting of spt_pathcpthld
< spt_pathpfthld should be rejected with errno set to EINVAL. An
implementation MAY support only setting of spt_pathcpthld =
spt_pathpfthld and spt_pathcpthld = 0xffff. In this case it shall
reject setting of other values with errno set to EINVAL.
5.3. Exposing the Potentially Failed Path State
(SCTP_EXPOSE_POTENTIALLY_FAILED_STATE) Socket Option
Applications can control the exposure of the potentially failed path
state in the SCTP_PEER_ADDR_CHANGE event and the
SCTP_GET_PEER_ADDR_INFO as described in Section 5.1. The default
value is implementation specific.
This socket option uses the level IPPROTO_SCTP and the name
SCTP_EXPOSE_POTENTIALLY_FAILED_STATE.
The following structure is used to control the exposition of the
potentially failed path state:
struct sctp_assoc_value {
sctp_assoc_t assoc_id;
uint32_t assoc_value;
};
assoc_id: This parameter is ignored for one-to-one style sockets.
For one-to-many style sockets the application may fill in an
association identifier or SCTP_FUTURE_ASSOC. It is an error to
use SCTP_{CURRENT|ALL}_ASSOC in assoc_id.
assoc_value: The potentially failed path state is exposed if and
only if this parameter is non-zero.
6. Security Considerations
Security considerations for the use of SCTP and its APIs are
discussed in [RFC4960] and [RFC6458]. There are no new security
considerations introduced in this document.
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7. IANA Considerations
This document does not create any new registries or modify the rules
for any existing registries managed by IANA.
8. Proposed Change of Status (to be Deleted before Publication)
The initial status of this document was Experimental. However,
because of its usefulness, simple design and the existence of
multiple active implementations, it has been changed to PS by WG
consensus.
9. References
9.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC4960] Stewart, R., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol", RFC
4960, September 2007.
9.2. Informative References
[CARO02] Caro Jr., A., Iyengar, J., Amer, P., Heinz, G., and R.
Stewart, "A Two-level Threshold Recovery Mechanism for
SCTP", Tech report, CIS Dept, University of Delaware , 7
2002.
[CARO04] Caro Jr., A., Amer, P., and R. Stewart, "End-to-End
Failover Thresholds for Transport Layer Multihoming",
MILCOM 2004 , 11 2004.
[CARO05] Caro Jr., A., "End-to-End Fault Tolerance using Transport
Layer Multihoming", Ph.D Thesis, University of Delaware ,
1 2005.
[FALLON08]
Fallon, S., Jacob, P., Qiao, Y., Murphy, L., Fallon, E.,
and A. Hanley, "SCTP Switchover Performance Issues in WLAN
Environments", IEEE CCNC 2008, 1 2008.
[GRINNEMO04]
Grinnemo, K-J. and A. Brunstrom, "Performance of SCTP-
controlled failovers in M3UA-based SIGTRAN networks",
Advanced Simulation Technologies Conference , 4 2004.
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[IYENGAR06]
Iyengar, J., Amer, P., and R. Stewart, "Concurrent
Multipath Transfer using SCTP Multihoming over Independent
End-to-end Paths.", IEEE/ACM Trans on Networking 14(5), 10
2006.
[JUNGMAIER02]
Jungmaier, A., Rathgeb, E., and M. Tuexen, "On the use of
SCTP in failover scenarios", World Multiconference on
Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics , 7 2002.
[NATARAJAN09]
Natarajan, P., Ekiz, N., Amer, P., and R. Stewart,
"Concurrent Multipath Transfer during Path Failure",
Computer Communications , 5 2009.
[RFC6458] Stewart, R., Tuexen, M., Poon, K., Lei, P., and V.
Yasevich, "Sockets API Extensions for the Stream Control
Transmission Protocol (SCTP)", RFC 6458, December 2011.
Appendix A. Discussions of Alternative Approaches
This section lists alternative approaches for the issues desribed in
this document. Although these approaches do not require to update
RFC4960, we do not recommend them from the reasons described below.
A.1. Reduce Path.Max.Retrans (PMR)
Smaller values for Path.Max.Retrans shorten the failover duration.
In fact, this is recommended in some research results [JUNGMAIER02]
[GRINNEMO04] [FALLON08]. For example, if when Path.Max.Retrans=0,
SCTP switches to another destination on a single timeout. This
smaller value for Path.Max.Retrans can results in spurious failover,
which might be a problem.
Unlike SCTP-PF, the interval for heartbeat packets is governed by
'HB.interval' even during failover process. 'HB.interval' is usually
set in the order of seconds (recommended value is 30 seconds). When
the primary path becomes inactive, the next HB can be transmitted
only seconds later. Meanwhile, the primary path may have recovered.
In such situations, post failover, an endpoint is forced to wait on
the order of seconds before the endpoint can resume transmission on
the primary path. However, using smaller value for 'HB.interval'
might help this situation, but it will be the waste of bandwidth in
most cases.
In addition, smaller Path.Max.Retrans values also affect
'Association.Max.Retrans' values. When the SCTP association's error
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count (sum of error counts on all ACTIVE paths) exceeds
Association.Max.Retrans threshold, the SCTP sender considers the peer
endpoint unreachable and terminates the association. Therefore,
Section 8.2 in [RFC4960] recommends that Association.Max.Retrans
value should not be larger than the summation of the Path.Max.Retrans
of each of the destination addresses, else the SCTP sender considers
its peer reachable even when all destinations are INACTIVE. To avoid
such inconsistent behavior an SCTP implementation SHOULD reduce
Association.Max.Retrans accordingly whenever it reduces
Path.Max.Retrans. However, smaller Association.Max.Retrans value
increases chances of association termination during minor congestion
events.
A.2. Adjust RTO related parameters
As several research results indicate, we can also shorten the
duration of failover process by adjusting RTO related parameters
[JUNGMAIER02] [FALLON08]. During failover process, RTO keeps being
doubled. However, if we can choose smaller value for RTO.max, we can
stop the exponential growth of RTO at some point. Also, choosing
smaller values for RTO.initial or RTO.min can contribute to keep RTO
value small.
Similar to reducing Path.Max.Retrans, the advantage of this approach
is that it requires no modification to the current specification,
although it needs to ignore several recommendations described in the
Section 15 of [RFC4960]. However, this approach requires to have
enough knowledge about the network characteristics between end
points. Otherwise, it can introduce adverse side-effects such as
spurious timeouts.
Appendix B. Discussions for Path Bouncing Effect
The methods described in the document can accelerate the failover
process. Hence, they might introduce the path bouncing effect where
the sender keeps changing the data transmission path frequently.
This sounds harmful to the data transfer, however several research
results indicate that there is no serious problem with SCTP in terms
of path bouncing effect [CARO04] [CARO05].
There are two main reasons for this. First, SCTP is basically
designed for multipath communication, which means SCTP maintains all
path related parameters (CWND, ssthresh, RTT, error count, etc) per
each destination address. These parameters cannot be affected by
path bouncing. In addition, when SCTP migrates the data transfer to
another path, it starts with the minimal or the initial CWND. Hence,
there is little chance for packet reordering or duplicating.
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Second, even if all communication paths between the end-nodes share
the same bottleneck, the quick failover results in a behavior already
allowed by [RFC4960].
Authors' Addresses
Yoshifumi Nishida
GE Global Research
2623 Camino Ramon
San Ramon, CA 94583
USA
Email: nishida@wide.ad.jp
Preethi Natarajan
Cisco Systems
510 McCarthy Blvd
Milpitas, CA 95035
USA
Email: prenatar@cisco.com
Armando Caro
BBN Technologies
10 Moulton St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
Email: acaro@bbn.com
Paul D. Amer
University of Delaware
Computer Science Department - 434 Smith Hall
Newark, DE 19716-2586
USA
Email: amer@udel.edu
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Karen E. E. Nielsen
Ericsson
Kistavaegen 25
Stockholm 164 80
Sweden
Email: karen.nielsen@tieto.com
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