Assured Forwarding PHB Group
RFC 2597
Document | Type |
RFC - Proposed Standard
(June 1999; Errata)
Updated by RFC 3260
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Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | IETF | ||
Formats | plain text pdf html bibtex | ||
Stream | WG state | (None) | |
Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 2597 (Proposed Standard) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group J. Heinanen Request for Comments: 2597 Telia Finland Category: Standards Track F. Baker Cisco Systems W. Weiss Lucent Technologies J. Wroclawski MIT LCS June 1999 Assured Forwarding PHB Group Status of this Memo This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document defines a general use Differentiated Services (DS) [Blake] Per-Hop-Behavior (PHB) Group called Assured Forwarding (AF). The AF PHB group provides delivery of IP packets in four independently forwarded AF classes. Within each AF class, an IP packet can be assigned one of three different levels of drop precedence. A DS node does not reorder IP packets of the same microflow if they belong to the same AF class. 1. Purpose and Overview There is a demand to provide assured forwarding of IP packets over the Internet. In a typical application, a company uses the Internet to interconnect its geographically distributed sites and wants an assurance that IP packets within this intranet are forwarded with high probability as long as the aggregate traffic from each site does not exceed the subscribed information rate (profile). It is desirable that a site may exceed the subscribed profile with the understanding that the excess traffic is not delivered with as high probability as the traffic that is within the profile. It is also Heinanen Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 2597 Assured Forwarding PHB Group June 1999 important that the network does not reorder packets that belong to the same microflow, as defined in [Nichols], no matter if they are in or out of the profile. Assured Forwarding (AF) PHB group is a means for a provider DS domain to offer different levels of forwarding assurances for IP packets received from a customer DS domain. Four AF classes are defined, where each AF class is in each DS node allocated a certain amount of forwarding resources (buffer space and bandwidth). IP packets that wish to use the services provided by the AF PHB group are assigned by the customer or the provider DS domain into one or more of these AF classes according to the services that the customer has subscribed to. Further background about this capability and some ways to use it may be found in [Clark]. Within each AF class IP packets are marked (again by the customer or the provider DS domain) with one of three possible drop precedence values. In case of congestion, the drop precedence of a packet determines the relative importance of the packet within the AF class. A congested DS node tries to protect packets with a lower drop precedence value from being lost by preferably discarding packets with a higher drop precedence value. In a DS node, the level of forwarding assurance of an IP packet thus depends on (1) how much forwarding resources has been allocated to the AF class that the packet belongs to, (2) what is the current load of the AF class, and, in case of congestion within the class, (3) what is the drop precedence of the packet. For example, if traffic conditioning actions at the ingress of the provider DS domain make sure that an AF class in the DS nodes is only moderately loaded by packets with the lowest drop precedence value and is not overloaded by packets with the two lowest drop precedence values, then the AF class can offer a high level of forwarding assurance for packets that are within the subscribed profile (i.e., marked with the lowest drop precedence value) and offer up to two lower levels of forwarding assurance for the excess traffic. This document describes the AF PHB group. An otherwise DS-compliant node is not required to implement this PHB group in order to be considered DS-compliant, but when a DS-compliant node is said to implement an AF PHB group, it must conform to the specification in this document. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in thisShow full document text