QUIC H. Shi
Internet-Draft Y. Cui
Intended status: Informational Z. Liu
Expires: May 20, 2020 Tsinghua University
November 17, 2019
Deadline-aware Transport Protocol
draft-shi-quic-dtp-00
Abstract
This document defines Deadline-aware Transport Protocol (DTP) to
provide block-based deliver-before-deadline transmission. The
intention of this memo is to describe a mechanism to fulfill
unreliable transmission based on QUIC as well as how to enhance
timeliness of data delivery.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on May 20, 2020.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2019 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
(https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Design of DTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Abstraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Architecture of DTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.3. Deadline-aware Scheduler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.4. Deadline-aware Redundancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.5. Loss Detection and Congestion Control . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Extension of QUIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. API of DTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1. Introduction
Many emerging applications have the deadline requirement for their
data transmission. However, current transport layer protocol like
TCP [RFC0793] and UDP [RFC0768] only provide primitive connection
establishment and data sending service. This document proposes a new
transport protocol atop QUIC [QUIC] to deliver application data
before end-to-end deadline.
1.1. Conventions
The keywords MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD,
SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, NOT RECOMMENDED, MAY, and OPTIONAL, when
they appear in this document, are to be interpreted as described in
[RFC2119].
2. Motivation
Many applications such as real-time media and online multiplayer
gaming have requirements for their data to arrive before a certain
time i.e., deadline. For example, the end-to-end delay of video
conferencing system should be below human perception (about 100ms) to
enable smooth interaction among participants. For Online multiplayer
gaming, the server aggregates each player's actions every 60ms and
distributes these information to other players so that each player's
state can be kept in sync.
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
These real-time applications have following common features:
o They tend to generate and process the data in block fashion. Each
block is a minimal data processing unit. Missing a single byte of
data will make the block useless. For example, video/audio
encoder produces the encoded streams as a series of block(I,B,P
frame or GOP). Decoder consumes the frame into the full image.
For online games, the player's commands and world state will be
bundled together as a message.
o They will continuously generate new data. Different from web
browsing or file syncing, real-time applications like video
conferencing and online multiplayer gaming have uninterruptedly
interactions with users, and each interaction requires a bunch of
new data to be transmitted.
o They prefer the timeliness of data instead of reliability since
blocks missing deadline are useless to application and will be
obsoleted by newer data. For example in multiplayer online games,
the gaming server will broadcast the latest player states to every
client, and the old information does not matter if it can not be
delivered in time. So the meaningful deadline of the application
is actually the block completion time i.e., the time between when
the block is generated at sender and when the block is submitted
to application at receiver.
However, current transport layer protocols lack support for block-
based deadline delivery. TCP guarantees reliability so it will waste
network resource to transmit stale data and cause fresh data to miss
its deadline. UDP is unreliable but it doesn't drop data according
to deadline, all data have the same chance to be dropped indeed.
QUIC makes several improvements and introduces Stream Prioritization
[QUIC] to enhance application performance, but prioritization is not
enough for enhancing timeliness.
Insufficiency of existing transport layer forces applications to
design their own customized and complex mechanism to meet the
deadline requirement. For example, the video bitrate auto-adjustment
in most streaming applications. But this is a disruption to the
Layered Internet Architecture, since application is not supposed to
worry about network conditions.
This document proposes Deadline-aware Transport Protocol (DTP) to
provide deliver-before-deadline transmission. DTP is implemented as
an extension of QUIC (Refer to [Section 4]) because QUIC provides
many useful building blocks including full encryption, user space
deployment, zero-RTT handshake and multiplexing without head-of-line
blocking.
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
3. Design of DTP
The key insight of DTP is that these real-time applications usually
have multiple blocks (As shown in Figure 1 below) to be transferred
simultaneously and these blocks have diverse impact on user
experience(denoted as priority). For example, audio data is more
important than video stream in video conferencing. Central region is
more important than surrounding region in 360 degree video.
Foreground object rendering is more important than the background
scene in mobile VR offloading.
The priority difference among multiple blocks makes it possible to
drop low priority data to improve timeliness of high priority data
delivery, which can enhance the overall QoE if resources allocated to
blocks are correctly prioritized. In this section, we describe the
mechanism which enables DTP to leverage that insight.
3.1. Abstraction
DTP provides block-based data abstraction for application to
facilitate the scheduling decision. Application can attach metadata
along with the data block, those metadata include:
o Each block has a deadline requirement, meaning if the block cannot
arrive before the deadline, then the whole block may become
useless because it will be overwrote by newer blocks. The
application can mark the deadline timestamp indicating the
deadline of its completion time. In the API of DTP, the deadline
argument represents the desired block completion time in ms.
o Each block has its own importance to the user experience. The
application can assign each block a priority to indicate the
importance of the block. The lower the priority value, the more
important the block. The priority argument also indicates the
reliability requirement of the block. The higher priority, the
less likely the block will be dropped by sender.
3.2. Architecture of DTP
The sender side architecture is shown in Figure 1:
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
+-------------+
| |
| Application |
| |
+-------------+
|
|
V
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| 0 1 n |
| +----+---+---+ +----+---+---+ +----+---+---+ |
| |Data| D | P | |Data| D | P | ... |Data| D | P | |<--+ Lost
| +----+---+---+ +----+---+---+ +----+---+---+ | | Packet
| D: Deadline P: Priority | |
+-----------------------------------------------------+ |
| |
| |
V |
+-------------+ |
| | | Bandwidth
| Scheduler |<----------------------+ &
| | | RTT
+-------------+ |
| |
| |
V |
+-------------+ |
| | |
| Redundancy |<----------------------+ Loss
| Encoder | | Rate
+-------------+ |
| |
| |
V |
+-------------+ |
| | |
| Congestion +-----------------------+
| Control |
+-------------+
Figure 1: The Architecture of DTP
In receiver side, the transport layer will receive data and
reassemble the block. The process is symmetric with the sender side.
It first goes through packet parsing and redundancy processing
module. Transport layer also keeps track of the deadline of each
block. When receiver calls RECV function (Refer to [Section 5]), the
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
transport layer returns the received in-ordered data to the
application.
3.3. Deadline-aware Scheduler
The scheduler will pick the blocks to send and drop stale blocks when
the buffer is limited. This section describes the algorithm of DTP
scheduler.
Scheduler of DTP takes into account many factors when picking blocks
in sender buffer to send. The goal of the scheduler is to deliver as
much as high priority data before the deadline and drop obsolete or
low-priority blocks. To achieve this, the scheduler utilizes both
bandwidth and RTT measurement provided by the congestion control
module and the metadata of blocks provided by the application to
estimate the block completion time. The scheduler will run each time
ACK is received or the application pushes the data.
A simple algorithm which only considers priority cannot get optimal
result in transmitting deadline-required data. Suppose the bandwidth
reduces and the scheduler chooses not to send the low priority block.
Then the bandwidth is restored. The data block with lower priority
is closer to the deadline than the high priority block. If in this
round the scheduler still chooses to send the high priority block,
then the low priority block may miss the deadline next round and
become useless. In some cases, the scheduler can choose to send a
low priority block because it's more urgent. But it should do so
without causing the high priority stream missing the deadline. This
example reveals a fundamental conflict between the application
specified priority and deadline implicated priority. DTP needs to
take both priorities into consideration when scheduling blocks.
DTP will combine all these factors to calculate real priority of each
block. Then the scheduler just picks the block with the highest real
priority. Scheduler of DTP will calculate the block remaining
transmission time and then compare it to the deadline. The closer to
the deadline, the higher real priority. And higher application
specified priority will also result in higher real priority. In this
way, the scheduler can take both approaching deadline and
application-specified priority into account. Blocks which are
severely overdue can be dropped accordingly.
3.4. Deadline-aware Redundancy
After the scheduler pick the block to send, the packetizer will break
the block into packet streams. Those packet streams will go through
the redundancy module. When the link is lossy and deadline is tight,
retransmission will cause the block missing the deadline. The
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
redundancy module can help mitigate that problem by generating the
redundancy packets to avoid retransmission. Since only
retransmission of tail packets of the block will increase the block
completion time so the redundancy is only applied to tail packets of
each block. The tail packets is defined within the Bandwidth-Delay
Product range of the block. And blocks with higher priority also get
more redundancy.
3.5. Loss Detection and Congestion Control
This document reuses the congestion control module defined in QUIC
[QUIC]. Congestion control module is responsible to send packets,
collects ACK and do packet loss detection. Then it will put the lost
data back to the retransmission queue of each block. Congestion
control module is also responsible to monitor the network status and
report the network condition such as bandwidth and RTT to scheduler.
4. Extension of QUIC
DTP is implemented as an extension of QUIC by mapping QUIC stream to
DTP block one to one. In that way, DTP can reuse the QUIC stream
cancellation mechanism to drop the stale block during transmission.
And DTP can also utilize the max stream data size defined by QUIC to
negotiate its max block size. Besides, the block id of DTP can also
be mapped to QUIC stream id without breaking the QUIC stream id
semantic.
5. API of DTP
DTP extends the send socket API to let application attach metadata
along with the data block, and the API of DTP is structured as
follows:
A) Data transmission functions
Send
Format: SEND(connection id, buffer address, byte count, block id,
block deadline, block priority) -> byte count
The return value of SEND is the continuous bytes count which is
successfully written. If the transport layer buffer is limited or
the flow control limit of the block is reached, application needs
to call SEND again.
Mandatory attributes:
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
* connection id - local connection name of an indicated
connection.
* buffer address - the location where the block to be transmitted
is stored.
* byte count - the size of the block data in number of bytes.
* block id - the identity of the block.
* block deadline - deadline of the block.
* block priority - priority of the block.
Update
Format: UPDATE(connection id, block id, block deadline, block
priority) -> result
The UPDATE function is used to update the metadata of the block.
The return value of UPDATE function indicates the success of the
action. It will return success code if succeeds, and error code
if fails.
Mandatory attributes:
* connection id - local connection name of an indicated
connection.
* block id - the identity of the block.
* block deadline - new deadline of the block.
* block priority - new priority of the block.
Retreat
Format: RETREAT(connection id, block id) -> result
The RETREAT function is used to cancel the block. The return
value of RETREAT function indicates the success of the action. It
will return success code if succeeds, and error code if fails.
Mandatory attributes:
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
* connection id - local connection name of an indicated
connection.
* block id - the identity of the block.
Receive
Format: RECV(connection id, buffer address, byte count, [,block
id]) -> byte count, fin flag, [,block id]
The RECV function shall read the first block in-queue into the
buffer specified, if there is one available. The return value of
RECV is the number of continuous bytes which is successfully read,
and fin flag to indicate the ending of the block. If the block is
cancelled, the RECV function will return error code
BLOCK_CANCELLED. It will also returns the block id on which it
receives if application does not specify it.
If the block size specified in the RECV function is smaller than
the size of the receiving block, then the block will be partial
copied(indicated by the fin flag). Next time RECV function is
called, the remaining block will be copied, and the id will be the
same. This fragmentation will give extra burden to applications.
To avoid the fragmentation, sender and receiver can negotiate a
max block size when handshaking.
Mandatory attributes:
* connection id - local connection name of an indicated
connection.
* buffer address - the location where the block received is
stored.
* byte count - the size of the block data in number of bytes.
Optional attributes:
* block id - to indicate which block to receive the data on.
B) Feedback functions
Status
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
Format: STATS(connection id, block id) -> byte count
The STATS function is used to query the deadline delivery result.
The application uses STATS to query the bytes delivered before the
deadline to receiver of each block. The information can be used
to adjust the block sending rate of each priority. For example,
if the application finds that the lowest priority block always get
dropped due to the limited bandwidth, the application can stop
generating the block to save the computation power. Combined the
status of each priority, the application can also get the overall
network capacity to facilitate the rate adaptation algorithm.
Mandatory attributes:
* connection id - local connection name of an indicated
connection.
* block id - the identity of the block.
Block Completion Time (BCT)
Format: QUERY_BCT(connection id, block id) -> block completion
time
After receiving the block, application can query the block
completion time using QUERY_BCT. This can also facilitate the
rate or deadline adaptation of application. For example, if the
base RTT of the network is bigger than deadline, then all blocks
will miss the deadline. In this case, application may choose to
relax its deadline.
Mandatory attributes:
* connection id - local connection name of an indicated
connection.
* block id - the identity of the block.
All these functions mentioned above are running in asynchronous mode.
An application can use various event driven framework to call those
functions.
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
6. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
7. Security Considerations
See the security considerations in [QUIC] and [QUIC-TLS]; the block-
based data of DTP shares the same security properties as the data
transmitted within a QUIC connection
8. Normative References
[QUIC] Iyengar, J. and M. Thomson, "QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed
and Secure Transport", draft-ietf-quic-transport-20 (work
in progress), April 2019.
[QUIC-TLS]
Thomson, M. and S. Turner, "Using TLS to Secure QUIC",
draft-ietf-quic-tls-20 (work in progress), April 2019.
[RFC0768] Postel, J., "User Datagram Protocol", STD 6, RFC 768,
DOI 10.17487/RFC0768, August 1980,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc768>.
[RFC0793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
RFC 793, DOI 10.17487/RFC0793, September 1981,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc793>.
[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>.
Authors' Addresses
Hang Shi
Tsinghua University
30 Shuangqing Rd
Beijing
China
Email: shi-h15@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft DTP November 2019
Yong Cui
Tsinghua University
30 Shuangqing Rd
Beijing
China
Email: cuiyong@tsinghua.edu.cn
Zhiwen Liu
Tsinghua University
30 Shuangqing Rd
Beijing
China
Email: liu-zw16@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
Shi, et al. Expires May 20, 2020 [Page 12]