Subject: [PCN] first draft of PCN BOF minutes

From: "Anna Charny \(acharny\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:29:10 -0500

Dear all,

Here is the first draft of PCN BOF minutes.

Those who were present, please take a look and send your corrections.

Thank you,
Anna Charny

====
Pre-Congestion Notification BOF

Monday, November 6 at 0900-1130

Room: Grande Ballroom C

BOF Co-Chairs: Anna Charny and Scott Bradner

PCN BOF Agenda

1. Agenda Bashing and Administrativia (5 min)

Scott Bradner: Robert Schaffer will be talking about work in another
SDO.

No comments.

2. Overview and Introduction (20 min)

 Anna Charny (& Scott Bradner), BoF co-chairs:

Details:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-chan-pcn-problem-statement-01.
txt 

1/ What is PCN?

* Admission control & pre-emption using packet marking

   Either core nodes or edge nodes

2/ Why it's a technical problem of interest

* Why admission control (AC)? - stretching traffic assumptions beyond
current typical mix to large proportions of inelastic traffic, dealing
with failures & anomalous traffic scenarios

* Why yet another AC mechanism?

   A further scalability step beyond Intserv over diffserv, aggregate
reservations and reservation-based RMD (no core state but still
signalling in core)

* State of Maturity: builds on substantial body of prior theoretical
work, and substantial recent work by those working on PCN 3/ Why an IETF
problem?

* Progressed to stage where standardisation of packet marking would be
reasonable

* Some open issues, where consensus still hasn't converged (see Phil
Eardley's presentation next)

   - marking behaviour

   - marking encoding

   - how much aggregation is 'enough'

   - consensus best formed around discussing these issues wrt
well-understood deployment models.

* Connection with other groups:

   - RFC3168 ECN compatibility (tsvwg)

   - signalling extensions to be done in relevant groups

     - RSVP (tsv), NSIS (nsis), SIP (mmusic)

   - pcn over MPLS (tsv)

   - relevance to certain pseudo-wires? (pwe3)

   - Ensuring emergency services work across a PCN cloud (ieprep &
ecrit)

* summary: legitimate tech problem, needs standardisation, bounded
problem, reasonable number of open issues to resolve 4/ Summary:

* There is a legitimate technical problem

* There is need of standardization effort

* The solution is sufficiently mature

* There are a bounded number of open issues needing resolution

Hannes Tschofenig: There was no official design team working on PCN in
TSVWG, correct?

Scott Bradner:  Correct.

Stuart Goldman: Are you interacting with organizations outside the IETF?

Scott Bradner: After forming a working group a message is sent to the
new work 

mailing list where many other SDOs are subscribed to announce it and to 

determine overlaps.

3. Key Open Issues (10 min)

------------------

Phil Eardley

1/ Standardization issues

* packet marking (without defining algorithm, but ensuring
interoperability)

* mark encoding (ECN, DSCP?)

* conversion of packet marking into flow-granularity AC & pre-emption
decisions (exactly one behavior, or more than one - perhaps different
deployment scenarios need different behaviors: current consensus:
exactly one behavior is doable)

* Focusing the work

   - community consensus required on deployment models

   - then community consensus required on assumptions (loosen
assumptions for re-chartered phase II) underlying these deployment
models that are necessary for PCN to work.

* Main assumptions

   - PCN region is fully enclosed by edge nodes that ensure no PCN
traffic can enter without AC. (controlled environment)

   - Avoid cheating issues (but likely to be the issues that comes up
after

re-chartering)

   - Specific handling of emergency and flow-level precedence out of w-g
scope, but ensure we don't preclude what others are doing

2/ Technical issues

   - compatibility of coding with RFC3168

   - sub-optimalities: ECMP, bi-directional flows & pre-emption WG will
need to reach consensus on the extent to which standardization effort
should address these

Jongwon Choe (name not clear), DoD: Why to exclude the emergency service
work on preemption?

Philip Eardley: It would add a lot of complexity. They are not really in
the  expertise of the PCN group.

Anna Charny:  Not focusing on *standardizing* MLP, but scope does
include working with other groups who do

Kwok Ho Chan: Clarification: Policy on MLP etc is an edge-edge issue,
that we don't need to preclude in focusing on the interior to edge
interface

Robert Shafer: Chair of the Network Interconnection Interoperability 

Forum gives a brief overview of their organizations and the work they
do. They started with work on PSTN and now focus more on IP. Their group
is looking forward to interact with the PCN group.

Scott Bradner suggests that members from their group subscribe to the
mailing list.

Stuart Goldman: ATIS BTSC SAG & ITU-T would be groups to talk to.

Scott Bradner: Information from these groups would be useful.

Robert Schafer: Emergency announcements to local areas over PSTN -
ultimately NIIF may extend into this space. These calls look like
regular calls, not specially marked. This would be a hard problem.

4. Overview of Existing Work (10 min)

Kwok Ho Chan

* Deployment Models

   - Controlled Load : RSVP as signalling protocol outside and between
PCN edge nodes see

<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-briscoe-cl-architecture-04.tx
t
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-briscoe-cl-architecture-04.tx
t> 

   - SIP controlled flow admission & pre-emption model see

   <http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-babiarz-pcn-sip-cap-00.txt
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-babiarz-pcn-sip-cap-00.txt> 

James Polk: Where does a phone fit in the middle?

Kwok Ho Chan: Phone on edge of PCN region 

Dave Oran: Find picture incredibly confusing but suggest to move on

Joe Babiarz: PCN region extends to end-points 

David Black: Is the assumption that phones are trusted?

Kwok Ho Chan: Yes

Francois le Faucheur: the call-server is meant to be *above* the data
plane, not on the edge of the PCN region

Bruce Davie: Confusingly described. Also may not be legitimate. But the
w-g can decide whether or not it is a legitimate model to take on board,
don't have to decide in the BoF.

Dave Oran: Is it that the real issue is what the data plane is doing to
determine whether to admit the call, with some signalling to set up the
call that may be SIP (or anything else)

Dave Oran: This has nothing todo with SIP. There is something that is 

required to clue SIP together with PCN.

David Black: Yes, you need a control plane and SIP may be an example.

Kwok Ho Chan continues his presentation 

* Measurement and Encoding at Interior Router

   -
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-03.txt   
   -
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-zhang-pcn-performance-evaluati
on-00.txt 
   - http://standards.nortel.com/pcn/simulation_results_00.pdf  

    - Example packet marking method described in the cl-phb draft above
for AC & flow pre-emption

    - Measurement of marking of aggregate for AC & flow pre-emption also
described

Lars Eggert: BCP upcoming on how you safely redefine ECN.

Stuart Goldman: How fast does it take to get back to normal?

Anna Charny:  Depending on the parameters it might take more than 1
second 

but for set of "reasonable" parameters used in simulation it does
preempt within 1 second.  A few seconds is the target preemption time 

Normally, a call is 2 min. But if quality of service degrades
dramatically, then in a few sec most of the users hang up.  And if all
users are affected, all users can hang up. Therefore you want to preempt
before that time, so that you only preempt enough calls to make sure
that other calls are not affected.

Kwok Ho Chan: In some jurisdictions it is not allowed to preempt calls.

Question:  Does preemption by the network allow information to be
returned to the end host.

Francois Le Faucheur: Yes.

Bob Briscoe: You don't have to use preemption, but an operator could use
it.

Francois: The idea is to add some determinism when a failure happens. 

There will be signaling to tear down the call properly to give the end 

host (user) some feedback.

Kwok Ho Chan continues with the slides:

List of drafts at nortel holding place

http://standards.nortel.com/pcn/

Pre-Congestion Notification Problem Statement
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-chan-pcn-problem-statement-01.
txt  

Pre-Congestion Notification marking

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-phb-03.txt 

An edge-to-edge Deployment Model for Pre-Congestion Notification:

                  Admission Control over a DiffServ Region
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-briscoe-tsvwg-cl-architecture-
04.txt 

SIP Controlled Admission and Preemption

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-babiarz-pcn-sip-cap-00.txt 

Pre-Congestion Notification Using Single Marking for Admission and
Pre-emption 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-charny-pcn-single-marking-00.t
xt 

Performance Evaluation of CL-PHB Admission and pre-emption Algorithms
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-zhang-pcn-performance-evaluati
on-00.txt  

5. Open Discussion on PCN (20 min)

-------------------------

David Black:  The PCN region roughly corresponds to a Diffserv domain.
However, when we did Diffserv, we looked at cross-domain. There is the
risk of making the problem space larger than  it initially was.

Where this starts from is the trust discussion. The assumption was 

pretty good and corresponds to DiffServ. Failing to look at the cross 

domain stuff is too narrow scoped. It does not need to be on the 
MUST-to-be-solved items.

Scott Bradner: We talked about this. We thought about rechartering to
add this cross domain aspect later. Is this something to be solved
already in the first round? I don't  know. It needs to be addressed at
some point in time.

David Black: How much keeping in mind needs to be done to ensure that it
can be done later?

Bob Briscoe: Only brought PCN to the IETF a year or so ago once I had a
solution for inter-domain deployment where they don't trust each other
not to cheat. However, agree it is best to get the necessary parts
standardized for single trust region most urgently, then working on
multi-domain with no mutual trust after re-chartering. However, there
are some issues that have to be decided for a single domain that may
impact on the anti-cheating solution, e.g. PCN wire encoding. So we have
to keep in mind the multi-trust-domain scenario during initial
standardization.

David Black: As long as 'keep in mind' is taken strongly.

Yakhov Stein: What's all this for? Detect congestion because of a
failure?  Isn't there an easier mechanism when there is a failure?

Anna Charny:  Pre-emption deals with failure, Admission Control does not
- it is more for the situations when provisioning may not be the right
solution.

Dave Oran: I assumed we could have multiple classes, all with admission
control 

Bob Briscoe: Can isolate link capacities for each class, and can have
borrowing from other classes, but not priority access by another class
to the admission controlled resources

Yakhov Stein: What is the timescale of these pre-emption events?

Bruce Davie: Timescale is that of flow admission arrivals.

Yakhov Stein: Congestion causes packet forwarding to slow down -
performance hit. Anything that works on buffer level is already too
slow.

Anna Charny: We do not do that.  The idea of pre-congestion is to get
the notification before the congestion happens.

Francois Le Faucheur: You trigger before you are congested. The
mechanism is not to trigger the queue. You can use some sort of
threshold or virtual queues.
 
Dave Oran: I made the naive assumption that this stuff works on a
DiffServ class domain only.

Anna Charny: The assumption that it is applied to a DiffServ class is
correct. The traffic in the class is not elastic. 

Dave Oran: Is this necessary? Do we have mechanisms for elastic traffic
that work just fine. Can we say inelastic traffic?

Anna Charny: Yes.

Dave Oran: The ability of bandwidth sharing between different classes is
not provided.

Bob Briscoe: You don't need to have complete isolation

Liam Casey:  I have read the simulation draft. Stability is a huge 
factor. I am not sure there are large scale simulations show it is
stable. This has to go to work with millions of calls. It is not only
about simulations of 5 servers.
 
Anna Charny: Yes, the current simulation do not come close to real-world
systems. However, we need to talk off-line about what stability means
here. We need to understand to what extent stability concerns for
traditional congestion control are applicable here. 

Scott Bradner: You haven't tried large scale stability simulations?

Anna Charny: No, not yet.

Lars Eggert: How quickly do you react to congestion notification?

Anna Charny: It has to react quickly before people hang up.

Lars Eggert: Is the detection of congestion slower than the detection of

pre-congestion?

Anna Charny: Yes

Josepf Babiarz: The detection is fast but there is the question on how
long it needs to take before taking some actions.

Scott Bradner: Being very aggressive leads to instability.

Lars Eggert: Is there any algorithm between the preemption vs. going
down with admitting new flows?

Anna Charny: There is an algorithm in the cl-arcitecture and Cl-phb
drafts.

(speaker at the mike, name not recorded): Preempting is a rather a
difficult thing todo. Have you thought about notifying users to fall
back to a different  codec rather than preempting their conversation.

This, however, requires feedback to a user.

Josef Babiarz: Yes.

Anna Charny: There are two different questions:

a) Have we looked at it?

b) Should the working group do it?

Regarding (a): yes. Regarding (b): No under the proposed charter.

Scott Bradner: That's a reasonable thing to discuss on the mailing list.

Dana Blair: Is there a formal definition of stability?

Scott: Do you have some suggestions?

Anna: I don't know how to answer this question in this context.
Stability is typically applied to congestion control systems where the
function of interest can adjust up or down.  In the framework we
propose, Admission Control can only stop admission, and pre-emption can
only bring the amount of traffic down.  So there are two questions of
interest:

a) Admission: Does it stop admitting when expected or does it over- or
under-admit?

b) Preemption: Does it pre-empt the right amount or does it over- or
under-shoot)?

Jim Bound: There is a lot of momentum for admission control. There is a
lot of things important in the proposed scope.

Scott Bradner: There are two things:

a) Propose work in the IETF

b) Keep in mind when designing the core protocol.

You need to know what the requirements are to design the protocol.

6. Proposed Charter (20 min)

Anna Charny presents 

http://standards.nortel.com/pcn/PCN_draft_charter_v01.txt

* Standards track docs to address 3 areas:

   1. When should an interior router mark a packet (i.e. at what traffic

level) in order to give early warning of its own congestion?

   2. How should such a mark be encoded in a packet (in the ECN and/or
DSCP fields)?

   3. How should these markings (at packet granularity) be converted
into admission control and flow pre-emption decisions (at flow
granularity)?

Jacob Stein: When should a router mark a packet sounds like
implementation.

Scott Bradner/Bruce Davie (both said same thing): Shouldn't describe
hardware, but should describe behavior for interoperability.

Anna Charny continues presentation:

* Informational documents:

   1. a Problem Statement

James Polk: Don't see requrements doc. Problem statement isn't the same 

Scott Bradner: In general believe reqs doc is a good idea. Also worried
about getting bogged down.

Anna Charny continues

   2. at least two deployment models, possibly from:

    - like IntServ over DiffServ (RFC2998) but with PCN-enabled DiffServ
region and edge nodes decide about admission and flow pre-emption

    - SIP Controlled Admission and Preemption: using trusted SIP
endpoints (gateway or host) performing admission and flow pre-emption
and PCN-capable routers within the DiffServ region

James Polk: Sounds like a SIP doc for SIPPING 

Scott Bradner: This represents requirements to SIPPING

Stuart Goldman: Is it reasonable to add a boilerplate to the charter to
say  that work will be done with other working group.

Anna: Sounds good to me.

Scott: Also useful.

Anna Charny continues presentation:

    - Pseudowire: PCN may be used as a congestion avoidance mechanism
for end-user deployed pseudowires (collaborate with the PWE3 WG)

Lars Eggert: Not solving the whole pseudo-wire problem, so won't be
useful.

Yakhov Stein: Nowhere does it say PWE3 should be over provisioned paths 

Lars Eggert: There is an statement that does say this.

Dave Oran: If it requires SIP to change, we have problems, but I doubt
it does. It has a dependency on SDP, which has the QoS pre-conditions.

Anna Charny: What would you suggest?

Dave Oran: Change the wording to Application-controlled (rather than
SIP-controlled) admission & pre-emption

Stuart Goldman: As SIPPING says they take all changes to SIP, shouldn't
this w-g say it takes all PCN-related aspects?

Scott Bradner: Good point

Bruce Davie: Reservation on using PCN for pseudo-wire is that concern
with PWE3 is immediate deployment of Internet as-is. There is precious
little ECN, let alone PCN deployment (given it's not standardized yet)
in the current Internet.

Anna Charny: Should pseudo-wires stay in the charter?

Bruce Davie: No, too forward looking for a phase 1 charter

Anna Charny continues presentation:

   3. analysis of the signaling extensions required to support PCN

     - actual extensions in other w-gs (RSVP, NSIS, SIP) not PCN 

   4. at least one example solution implementing the framework and its
performance evaluation (e.g. simulation)

   5. tradeoffs between different encoding possibilities (e.g. ECN and
DCSP marking)

* Initial restriction of scope (assumptions):

   1. Trust assumption: PCN region is a controlled environment

David Black: Trust assumption: need to add 'keeping in mind'
interconnection. I won't let you forget that.

   2. aggregation: many flows on any link

   3. inelastic traffic: QoS assurance for r-t apps generating inelastic
traffic - voice & video low delay, jitter and packet loss, i.e.
Controlled Load Svc [RFC2211].

   4. Specific handling of emergency and other precedence (911, GETS,
WPS, MLPP etc.) calls out of scope,

   - *but* PCN must ensure using PCN technology doesn't preclude edge
nodes from taking the appropriate emergency actions required by these
standards/initiatives

   - PCN Internal Nodes may not be MLPP-aware but they are DSCP aware

Bob Briscoe: Assumption 2 (aggregation) doesn't seem to include SIP
endpoint 

Matt Mathis: Change assumption 2 to "There are sufficient flows where
relevant bottlenecks"

Anna Charny: Will do

Francois le Faucheur: Assumption 2: Add applicability statement to the
charter.

* Re-chartering later

May relax some of the assumptions when re-chartering (e.g. single trust
domain assumption)

Out of scope: general investigation of AC mechs - we build on
considerable academic and prior IETF work on measurement-based admission
control (MBAC)

Milestones

----------

Nov 2006 initial Problem statement

Nov 2006 initial deployment models

March 2007 initial router marking behavior (including encoding) March
2007 initial flow admission control and pre-emption mechanism (including
edge node behavior) March/July 2007 submit Problem statement March/July
2007 submit deployment models Nov 2007 submit router marking behavior
Nov 2007/Mar 2008 submit flow admission control and pre-emption
mechanism Nov 2007 initial signaling analysis Mar 2008 re-charter or
close

Francois le Faucheur: How would applicability statement fit into
milestones?

Scott Bradner: Personally a stand-alone applicability statement would be
my preference.

David Black: Would need an applicability statement specific to the
endpoint model. 

Scott Bradner: Or not signalling protocol specific 

David Black: Need to use SIP as an example app signalling protocol 

Dave Oran: Most important aspect is endpoint-endpoint in that deployment
model.

Georgios Karagiannis: SIP applicability statement. Yes, SIP just an
example application signalling protocol. Also need end-to-concentrator,
or concentrator-to-concentrator.

7. Discussion of Proposed Charter (20 min)

No further discussion

8. Summary and Conclusions (10 min)

Scott Bradner: Is this ready for IETF w-g?

[About 150 people in the room.] Of which about 100 voted:

~98 for; 2 against

Scott Bradner: Now the task is to work with the ADs on a charter, to
post to list. This BoF does not presuppose who the w-g chairs are in any
way.

Lars Eggert: Show of hands please, on who is interested (other than the
authors of the drafts) in helping in this w-g? 7 hands up.

Question from the room: Is there a mailing list?

Anna Charny:  [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]> 

[Subscribe via: <https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/pcn
<https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/pcn> ]

 

_______________________________________________
PCN mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/pcn

---

From: "Jozef Babiarz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2006 13:45:41 -0500

Anna,
The BOF minutes look OK to me.
Would like to suggest that you fix, some typos and format (remove black
lines) as well.

Correct "Jongwon Choe" to "Yong Xue".
Change MLP to MLPP.

Regards, Joe
QoS & Network Architecture
Telephone: 613-763-6098 (ESN 393-6098)
Email: [email-masked]
-----Original Message-----
From: Anna Charny (acharny) [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2006 5:29 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [PCN] first draft of PCN BOF minutes

Dear all,

Thank you,
Anna Charny

====

Room: Grande Ballroom C

PCN BOF Agenda

No comments.

Details:

1/ What is PCN?

   - marking behaviour

   - marking encoding

   - pcn over MPLS (tsv)

Scott Bradner:  Correct.

determine overlaps.

------------------

Phil Eardley

* Focusing the work

* Main assumptions

re-chartering)

2/ Technical issues

 

Kwok Ho Chan

* Deployment Models

Kwok Ho Chan: Yes

   -

 

Anna Charny: Yes.

 

pre-congestion?

Anna Charny: Yes

Josef Babiarz: Yes.

a) Have we looked at it?

Anna Charny presents 

   1. a Problem Statement

Anna Charny continues

Anna: Sounds good to me.

Scott: Also useful.

Anna Charny: Will do

* Re-chartering later

Milestones

----------

No further discussion

~98 for; 2 against

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:53:51 -0000

Anna,

Here are some extra things that were in my notes of the BoF

Part 5 "Open discussion on PCN"
After Bob Briscoe's comment "Can isolate link capacities..."
Add
Dave Oran: In assumption about inelastic traffic, remove "real time"

Change, 
> Yakhov Stein: What is the timescale of these pre-emption events?
To
Yakhov Stein: What is the timescale to detect congestion events?

Change
>(speaker at the mike, name not recorded):
to
Yakhov Stein

After
> Scott Bradner: That's a reasonable thing to discuss on the mailing
list.
Add
Bob Briscoe: Trust assumption means can't assume applications will
react.

Part 6 "Proposed charter"
after "initial restrictions of scope ... 3 inelastic traffic"
add
John Kenney: could several DSCPs all be subject to the same treatment
Anna Charny: Yes. But haven't looked at possible interactions if
different drop priorities.

phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Jozef Babiarz [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: 12 November 2006 18:46
To: Anna Charny (acharny); [email-masked]
Subject: RE: [PCN] first draft of PCN BOF minutes

Anna,

Regards, Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: Anna Charny (acharny) [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2006 5:29 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [PCN] first draft of PCN BOF minutes

Dear all,

Thank you,
Anna Charny

====

Room: Grande Ballroom C

PCN BOF Agenda

No comments.

Details:

1/ What is PCN?

   - marking behaviour

   - marking encoding

   - pcn over MPLS (tsv)

Scott Bradner:  Correct.

determine overlaps.

------------------

Phil Eardley

* Focusing the work

* Main assumptions

re-chartering)

2/ Technical issues

 

Kwok Ho Chan

* Deployment Models

Kwok Ho Chan: Yes

   -

 

Anna Charny: Yes.

 

pre-congestion?

Anna Charny: Yes

Josef Babiarz: Yes.

a) Have we looked at it?

Anna Charny presents 

   1. a Problem Statement

Anna Charny continues

Anna: Sounds good to me.

Scott: Also useful.

Anna Charny: Will do

* Re-chartering later

Milestones

----------

No further discussion

~98 for; 2 against