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rfc:rfc1254

Network Working Group A. Mankin Request for Comments: 1254 MITRE

                                                       K. Ramakrishnan
                                         Digital Equipment Corporation
                                                               Editors
                                                           August 1991
                 Gateway Congestion Control Survey

Status of this Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It is a
 survey of some of the major directions and issues.  It does not
 specify an Internet standard.  Distribution of this memo is
 unlimited.

Abstract

 The growth of network intensive Internet applications has made
 gateway congestion control a high priority.  The IETF Performance and
 Congestion Control Working Group surveyed and reviewed gateway
 congestion control and avoidance approaches.  The purpose of this
 paper is to present our review of the congestion control approaches,
 as a way of encouraging new discussion and experimentation.  Included
 in the survey are Source Quench, Random Drop, Congestion Indication
 (DEC Bit), and Fair Queueing.  The task remains for Internet
 implementors to determine and agree on the most effective mechanisms
 for controlling gateway congestion.

1. Introduction

 Internet users regularly encounter congestion, often in mild forms.
 However, severe congestion episodes have been reported also; and
 gateway congestion remains an obstacle for Internet applications such
 as scientific supercomputing data transfer.  The need for Internet
 congestion control originally became apparent during several periods
 of 1986 and 1987, when the Internet experienced the "congestion
 collapse" condition predicted by Nagle [Nag84].  A large number of
 widely dispersed Internet sites experienced simultaneous slowdown or
 cessation of networking services for prolonged periods.  BBN, the
 firm responsible for maintaining the then backbone of the Internet,
 the ARPANET, responded to the collapse by adding link capacity
 [Gar87].
 Much of the Internet now uses as a transmission backbone the National
 Science Foundation Network (NSFNET). Extensive monitoring and
 capacity planning are being done for the NSFNET backbone; still, as

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 1] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 the demand for this capacity grows, and as resource-intensive
 applications such as wide-area file system management [Sp89]
 increasingly use the backbone, effective congestion control policies
 will be a critical requirement.
 Only a few mechanisms currently exist in Internet hosts and gateways
 to avoid or control congestion.  The mechanisms for handling
 congestion set forth in the specifications for the DoD Internet
 protocols are limited to:
    Window flow control in TCP [Pos81b], intended primarily for
    controlling the demand on the receiver's capacity, both in terms
    of processing and buffers.
    Source quench in ICMP, the message sent by IP to request that a
    sender throttle back [Pos81a].
 One approach to enhancing Internet congestion control has been to
 overlay the simple existing mechanisms in TCP and ICMP with more
 powerful ones.  Since 1987, the TCP congestion control policy, Slow-
 start, a collection of several algorithms developed by Van Jacobson
 and Mike Karels [Jac88], has been widely adopted. Successful Internet
 experiences with Slow-start led to the Host Requirements RFC [HREQ89]
 classifying the algorithms as mandatory for TCP.  Slow-start modifies
 the user's demand when congestion reaches such a point that packets
 are dropped at the gateway.  By the time such overflows occur, the
 gateway is congested.  Jacobson writes that the Slow-start policy is
 intended to function best with a complementary gateway policy
 [Jac88].

1.1 Definitions

 The characteristics of the Internet that we are interested in include
 that it is, in general, an arbitrary mesh-connected network.  The
 internetwork protocol is connectionless.  The number of users that
 place demands on the network is not limited by any explicit
 mechanism; no reservation of resources occurs and transport layer
 set-ups are not disallowed due to lack of resources.  A path from a
 source to destination host may have multiple hops, through several
 gateways and links.  Paths through the Internet may be heterogeneous
 (though homogeneous paths also exist and experience congestion).
 That is, links may be of different speeds.  Also, the gateways and
 hosts may be of different speeds or may be providing only a part of
 their processing power to communication-related activity.  The
 buffers for storing information flowing through Internet gateways are
 finite.  The nature of the internet protocol is to drop packets when
 these buffers overflow.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 2] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 Gateway congestion arises when the demand for one or more of the
 resources of the gateway exceeds the capacity of that resource.  The
 resources include transmission links, processing, and space used for
 buffering.  Operationally, uncongested gateways operate with little
 queueing on average, where the queue is the waiting line for a
 particular resource of the gateway.  One commonly used quantitative
 definition [Kle79] for when a resource is congested is when the
 operating point is greater than the point at which resource power is
 maximum, where resource power is defined as the ratio of throughput
 to delay (See Section 2.2).  At this operating point, the average
 queue size is close to one, including the packet in service.  Note
 that this is a long-term average queue size.  Several definitions
 exist for the timescale of averaging for congestion detection and
 control, such as dominant round-trip time and queue regeneration
 cycle (see Section 2.1).
 Mechanisms for handling congestion may be divided into two
 categories, congestion recovery and congestion avoidance.  Congestion
 recovery tries to restore an operating state, when demand has already
 exceeded capacity.  Congestion avoidance is preventive in nature.  It
 tries to keep the demand on the network at or near the point of
 maximum power, so that congestion never occurs.  Without congestion
 recovery, the network may cease to operate entirely (zero
 throughput), whereas the Internet has been operating without
 congestion avoidance for a long time.  Overall performance may
 improve with an effective congestion avoidance mechanism.  Even if
 effective congestion avoidance was in place, congestion recovery
 schemes would still be required, to retain throughput in the face of
 sudden changes (increase of demand, loss of resources) that can lead
 to congestion.
 In this paper, the term "user" refers to each individual transport
 (TCP or another transport protocol) entity.  For example, a TCP
 connection is a "user" in this terminology.  The terms "flow" and
 "stream" are used by some authors in the same sense.  Some of the
 congestion control policies discussed in this paper, such as
 Selective Feedback Congestion Indication and Fair Queueing aggregate
 multiple TCP connections from a single host (or between a source
 host-destination host pair) as a virtual user.
 The term "cooperating transport entities" will be defined as a set of
 TCP connections (for example) which follow an effective method of
 adjusting their demand on the Internet in response to congestion.
 The most restrictive interpretation of this term is that the
 transport entities follow identical algorithms for congestion control
 and avoidance.  However, there may be some variation in these
 algorithms.  The extent to which heterogeneous end-system congestion
 control and avoidance may be accommodated by gateway policies should

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 3] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 be a subject of future research. The role played in Internet
 performance of non-cooperating transport entities is discussed in
 Section 5.

1.2 Goals and Scope of This Paper

 The task remains for Internet implementors to determine effective
 mechanisms for controlling gateway congestion.  There has been
 minimal common practice on which to base recommendations for Internet
 gateway congestion control.  In this survey, we describe the
 characteristics of one experimental gateway congestion management
 policy, Random Drop, and several that are better-known:  Source
 Quench, Congestion Indication, Selective Feedback Congestion
 Indication, and Fair Queueing, both Bit-Round and Stochastic.  A
 motivation for documenting Random Drop is that it has as primary
 goals low overhead and suitability for scaling up for Internets with
 higher speed links.  Both of these are important goals for future
 gateway implementations that will have fast links, fast processors,
 and will have to serve large numbers of interconnected hosts.
 The structure of this paper is as follows.  First, we discuss
 performance goals, including timescale and fairness considerations.
 Second, we discuss the gateway congestion control policies.  Random
 Drop is sketched out, with a recommendation for using it for
 congestion recovery and a separate section on its use as congestion
 avoidance.  Third, since gateway congestion control in itself does
 not change the end-systems' demand, we briefly present the effective
 responses to these policies by two end-system congestion control
 schemes, Slow-start and End-System Congestion Indication.  Among our
 conclusions, we address the issues of transport entities that do not
 cooperate with gateway congestion control.  As an appendix, because
 of the potential interactions with gateway congestion policies, we
 report on a scheme to help in controlling the performance of Internet
 gateways to connection-oriented subnets (in particular, X.25).
 Resources in the current Internet are not charged to users of them.
 Congestion avoidance techniques cannot be expected to help when users
 increase beyond the capacity of the underlying facilities.  There are
 two possible solutions for this, increase the facilities and
 available bandwidth, or forcibly reduce the demand.  When congestion
 is persistent despite implemented congestion control mechanisms,
 administrative responses are needed.  These are naturally not within
 the scope of this paper.  Also outside the scope of this paper are
 routing techniques that may be used to relocate demand away from
 congested individual resources (e.g., path-splitting and load-
 balancing).

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 4] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

2. Performance Goals

 To be able to discuss design and use of various mechanisms for
 improving Internetwork performance, we need to have clear performance
 goals for the operation of gateways and sets of end-systems.
 Internet experience shows that congestion control should be based on
 adaptive principles; this requires efficient computation of metrics
 by algorithms for congestion control.  The first issue is that of the
 interval over which these metrics are estimated and/or measured.

2.1 Interval for Measurement/Estimation of Performance Metrics

 Network performance metrics may be distorted if they are computed
 over intervals that are too short or too long relative to the dynamic
 characteristics of the network.  For instance, within a small
 interval, two FTP users with equal paths may appear to have sharply
 different demands, as an effect of brief, transient fluctuations in
 their respective processing.  An overly long averaging interval
 results in distortions because of the changing number of users
 sharing the resource measured during the time.  It is similarly
 important for congestion control mechanisms exerted at end systems to
 find an appropriate interval for control.
 The first approach to the monitoring, or averaging, interval for
 congestion control is one based on round-trip times.  The rationale
 for it is as follows:  control mechanisms must adapt to changes in
 Internet congestion as quickly as possible.  Even on an uncongested
 path, changed conditions will not be detected by the sender faster
 than a round-trip time.  The effect of a sending end-system's control
 will also not be seen in less than a round-trip time in the entire
 path as well as at the end systems.  For the control mechanism to be
 adaptive, new information on the path is needed before making a
 modification to the control exerted.  The statistics and metrics used
 in congestion control must be able to provide information to the
 control mechanism so that it can make an informed decision.
 Transient information which may be obsolete before a change is made
 by the end-system should be avoided.  This implies the
 monitoring/estimating interval is one lasting one or more round
 trips.  The requirements described here give bounds on:
    How short an interval:  not small enough that obsolete information
    is used for control;
    How long:  not more than the period at which the end-system makes
    changes.
 But, from the point of view of the gateway congestion control policy,
 what is a round-trip time?  If all the users of a given gateway have

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 5] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 the same path through the Internet, they also have the same round-
 trip time through the gateway.  But this is rarely the case.
 A meaningful interval must be found for users with both short and
 long paths. Two approaches have been suggested for estimating this
 dynamically, queue regeneration cycle and frequency analysis.
 Use of the queue regeneration cycle has been described as part of the
 Congestion Indication policy.  The time period used for averaging
 here begins when a resource goes from the idle to busy state.  The
 basic interval for averaging is a "regeneration cycle" which is in
 the form of busy and idle intervals.  Because an average based on a
 single previous regeneration may become old information, the
 recommendation in [JRC87] is to average over the sum of two
 intervals, that is, the previous (busy and idle) period, and the time
 since the beginning of the current busy period.
 If the gateway users are window-based transport entities, it is
 possible to see how the regeneration interval responds to their
 round-trip times.  If a user with a long round-trip time has the
 dominant traffic, the queue length may be zero only when that user is
 awaiting acknowledgements.  Then the users with short paths will
 receive gateway congestion information that is averaged over several
 of their round-trip times.  If the short path traffic dominates the
 activity in the gateway, i.e., the connections with shorter round-
 trip times are the dominant users of the gateway resources, then the
 regeneration interval is shorter and the information communicated to
 them can be more timely. In this case, users with longer paths
 receive, in one of their round-trip times, multiple samples of the
 dominant traffic; the end system averaging is based on individual
 user's intervals, so that these multiple samples are integrated
 appropriately for these connections with longer paths.
 The use of frequency analysis has been described by [Jac89]. In this
 approach, the gateway congestion control is done at intervals based
 on spectral analysis of the traffic arrivals.  It is possible for
 users to have round-trip times close to each other, but be out of
 phase from each other. A spectral analysis algorithm detects this.
 Otherwise, if multiple round-trip times are significant, multiple
 intervals will be identified.  Either one of these will be
 predominant, or several will be comparable. An as yet difficult
 problem for the design of algorithms accomplishing this technique is
 the likelihood of "locking" to the frequency of periodic traffic of
 low intensity, such as routing updates.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 6] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

2.2 Power and its Relationship to the Operating Point

 Performance goals for a congestion control/avoidance strategy embody
 a conflict in that they call for as high a throughput as possible,
 with as little delay as possible.  A measure that is often used to
 reflect the tradeoff between these goals is power, the ratio of
 throughput to delay.  We would like to maximize the value of power
 for a given resource.  In the standard expression for power,
   Power = (Throughput^alpha)/Delay
 the exponent alpha is chosen for throughput, based on the relative
 emphasis placed on throughput versus delay: if throughput is more
 important, then a value of A alpha greater than one is chosen.  If
 throughput and delay are equally important (e.g., both bulk transfer
 traffic and interactive traffic are equally important), then alpha
 equal to one is chosen. The operating point where power is maximized
 is the "knee" in the throughput and delay curves.  It is desirable
 that the operating point of the resource be driven towards the knee,
 where power is maximized.  A useful property of power is that it is
 decreasing whether the resource is under- or over-utilized relative
 to the knee.
 In an internetwork comprising nodes and links of diverse speeds and
 utilization, bottlenecks or concentrations of demand may form.  Any
 particular user can see a single bottleneck, which is the slowest or
 busiest link or gateway in the path (or possibly identical "balanced"
 bottlenecks).  The throughput that the path can sustain is limited by
 the bottleneck.  The delay for packets through a particular path is
 determined by the service times and queueing at each individual hop.
 The queueing delay is dominated by the queueing at the bottleneck
 resource(s).  The contribution to the delay over other hops is
 primarily the service time, although the propagation delay over
 certain hops, such as a satellite link, can be significant.  We would
 like to operate all shared resources at their knee and maximize the
 power of every user's bottleneck.
 The above goal underscores the significance of gateway congestion
 control.  If techniques can be found to operate gateways at their
 resource knee, it can improve Internet performance broadly.

2.3 Fairness

 We would like gateways to allocate resources fairly to users.  A
 concept of fairness is only relevant when multiple users share a
 gateway and their total demand is greater than its capacity.  If
 demands were equal, a fair allocation of the resource would be to
 provide an equal share to each user.  But even over short intervals,

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 7] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 demands are not equal.  Identifying the fair share of the resource
 for the user becomes hard.  Having identified it, it is desirable to
 allocate at least this fair share to each user.  However, not all
 users may take advantage of this allocation.  The unused capacity can
 be given to other users.  The resulting final allocation is termed a
 maximally fair allocation.  [RJC87] gives a quantitative method for
 comparing the allocation by a given policy to the maximally fair
 allocation.
 It is known that the Internet environment has heterogeneous transport
 entities, which do not follow the same congestion control policies
 (our definition of cooperating transports). Then, the controls given
 by a gateway may not affect all users and the congestion control
 policy may have unequal effects.  Is "fairness" obtainable in such a
 heterogeneous community?  In Fair Queueing, transport entities with
 differing congestion control policies can be insulated from each
 other and each given a set share of gateway bandwidth.
 It is important to realize that since Internet gateways cannot refuse
 new users, fairness in gateway congestion control can lead to all
 users receiving small (sub-divided) amounts of the gateway resources
 inadequate to meet their performance requirements.  None of the
 policies described in this paper currently addresses this.  Then,
 there may be policy reasons for unequal allocation of the gateway
 resources.  This has been addressed by Bit-Round Fair Queueing.

2.4 Network Management

 Network performance goals may be assessed by measurements in either
 the end-system or gateway frame of reference.  Performance goals are
 often resource-centered and the measurement of the global performance
 of "the network," is not only difficult to measure but is also
 difficult to define.  Resource-centered metrics are more easily
 obtained, and do not require synchronization.  That resource-centered
 metrics are appropriate ones for use in optimization of power is
 shown by [Jaf81].
 It would be valuable for the goal of developing effective gateway
 congestion handling if Management Information Base (MIB) objects
 useful for evaluating gateway congestion were developed.  The
 reflections on the control interval described above should be applied
 when network management applications are designed for this purpose.
 In particular, obtaining an instantaneous queue length from the
 managed gateway is not meaningful for the purposes of congestion
 management.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 8] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

3. Gateway Congestion Control Policies

 There have been proposed a handful of approaches to dealing with
 congestion in the gateway. Some of these are Source Quench, Random
 Drop, Congestion Indication, Selective Feedback Congestion
 Indication, Fair Queueing, and Bit-Round Fair Queueing.  They differ
 in whether they use a control message, and indeed, whether they view
 control of the end-systems as necessary, but none of them in itself
 lowers the demand of users and consequent load on the network.  End-
 system policies that reduce demand in conjunction with gateway
 congestion control are described in Section 4.

3.1 Source Quench

 The method of gateway congestion control currently used in the
 Internet is the Source Quench message of the RFC-792 [Pos81a]
 Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). When a gateway responds to
 congestion by dropping datagrams, it may send an ICMP Source Quench
 message to the source of the dropped datagram.  This is a congestion
 recovery policy.
 The Gateway Requirements RFC, RFC-1009 [GREQ87], specifies that
 gateways should only send Source Quench messages with a limited
 frequency, to conserve CPU resources during the time of heavy load.
 We note that operating the gateway for long periods under such loaded
 conditions should be averted by a gateway congestion control policy.
 A revised Gateway Requirements RFC is being prepared by the IETF.
 Another significant drawback of the Source Quench policy is that its
 details are discretionary, or, alternatively, that the policy is
 really a family of varied policies.  Major Internet gateway
 manufacturers have implemented a variety of source quench
 frequencies.  It is impossible for the end-system user on receiving a
 Source Quench to be certain of the circumstances in which it was
 issued.  This makes the needed end-system response problematic:  is
 the Source Quench an indication of heavy congestion, approaching
 congestion, a burst causing massive overload, or a burst slightly
 exceeding reasonable load?
 To the extent that gateways drop the last arrived datagram on
 overload, Source Quench messages may be distributed unfairly.  This
 is because the position at the end of the queue may be unfairly often
 occupied by the packets of low demand, intermittent users, since
 these do not send regular bursts of packets that can preempt most of
 the queue space.
 [Fin89] developed algorithms for when to issue Source Quench and for
 responding to it with a rate-reduction in the IP layer on the sending

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 9] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 host.  The system controls end-to-end performance of connections in a
 manner similar to the congestion avoidance portion of Slow-start TCP
 [Jac88].

3.2 Random Drop

 Random Drop is a gateway congestion control policy intended to give
 feedback to users whose traffic congests the gateway by dropping
 packets on a statistical basis.  The key to this policy is the
 hypothesis that a packet randomly selected from all incoming traffic
 will belong to a particular user with a probability proportional to
 the average rate of transmission of that user.  Dropping a randomly
 selected  packet results in users which generate much traffic having
 a greater number of packets dropped compared with those generating
 little traffic.  The selection of packets to be dropped is completely
 uniform.  Therefore, a user who generates traffic of an amount below
 the "fair share" (as defined in Section 2.3) may also experience a
 small amount of packet loss at a congested gateway. This character of
 uniformity is in fact a primary goal that Random Drop attempts to
 achieve.
 The other primary goal that Random Drop attempts to achieve is a
 theoretical overhead which is scaled to the number of shared
 resources in the gateway rather than the number of its users.  If a
 gateway congestion algorithm has more computation the more users
 there are, this can lead to processing demands that are higher as
 congestion increases.  Also the low-overhead goal of Random Drop
 addresses concerns about the scale of gateway processing that will be
 required in the mid-term Internet as gateways with fast processors
 and links are shared by very large active sets of users.

3.2.1 For Congestion Recovery

 Random Drop has been proposed as an improvement to packet dropping at
 the operating point where the gateway's packet buffers overflow.
 This is using Random Drop strictly as a congestion recovery
 mechanism.
 In Random Drop congestion recovery, instead of dropping the last
 packet to arrive at the queue, a packet is selected randomly from the
 queue.  Measurements of an implementation of Random Drop Congestion
 Recovery [Man90] showed that a user with a low demand, due to a
 longer round-trip time path than other users of the gateway, had a
 higher drop rate with RDCR than without.  The throughput accorded to
 users with the same round-trip time paths was nearly equal with RDCR
 as compared to without it.  These results suggest that RDCR should be
 avoided unless it is used within a scheme that groups traffic more or
 less by round-trip time.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 10] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

3.2.2 For Congestion Avoidance

 Random Drop is also proposed as a congestion avoidance policy
 [Jac89].  The intent is to initiate dropping packets when the gateway
 is anticipated to become congested and remain so unless there is some
 control exercised.  This  implies  selection  of  incoming packets to
 be randomly dropped at a rate derived from identifying the level of
 congestion at the gateway.  The rate is the number of arrivals
 allowed between drops. It depends on the current operating point and
 the prediction of congestion.
 A part of the policy is to determine that congestion will soon occur
 and that the gateway is beginning to operate beyond the knee of the
 power curve.  With a suitably chosen interval (Section 2.1), the
 number of packets from each individual user in a sample over that
 interval is proportional to each user's demand on the gateway.  Then,
 dropping one or more random packets indicates to some user(s) the
 need to reduce the level of demand that is driving the gateway beyond
 the desired operating point.  This is the goal that a policy of
 Random Drop for congestion avoidance attempts to achieve.
 There are several parameters to be determined for a Random Drop
 congestion avoidance policy. The first is an interval, in terms of
 number of packet arrivals, over which packets are dropped with
 uniform probability.  For instance, in a sample implementation, if
 this interval spanned 2000 packet arrivals, and a suitable
 probability of drop was 0.001, then two random variables would be
 drawn in a uniform distribution in the range of 1 to 2,000.  The
 values drawn would be used by counting to select the packets dropped
 at arrival.  The second parameter is the value for the probability of
 drop.  This parameter would be a function of an estimate of the
 number of users, their appropriate control intervals, and possibly
 the length of time that congestion has persisted.  [Jac89] has
 suggested successively increasing the probability of drop when
 congestion persists over multiple control intervals.  The motivation
 for increasing the packet drop probability is that the implicit
 estimate of the number of users and random selection of their packets
 to drop does not guarantee that all users have received enough
 signals to decrease demand.  Increasing the probability of drop
 increases the probability that enough feedback is provided.
 Congestion detection is also needed in Random Drop congestion
 avoidance, and could be implemented in a variety of ways.  The
 simplest is a static threshold, but dynamically averaged measures of
 demand or utilization are suggested.
 The packets dropped in Random Drop congestion avoidance would not be
 from the initial inputs to the gateway.  We suggest that they would
 be selected only from packets destined for the resource which is

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 11] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 predicted to be approaching congestion.  For example, in the case of
 a gateway with multiple outbound links, access to each individual
 link is treated as a separate resource, the Random Drop policy is
 applied at each link independently.  Random Drop congestion avoidance
 would provide uniform treatment of all cooperating transport users,
 even over individual patterns of traffic multiplexed within one
 user's stream.  There is no aggregation of users.
 Simulation studies [Zha89], [Has90] have presented evidence that
 Random Drop is not fair across cooperating and non-cooperating
 transport users.  A transport user whose sending policies included
 Go-Back-N retransmissions and did not include Slow-start received an
 excessive share of bandwidth from a simple implementation of Random
 Drop.  The simultaneously active Slow-start users received unfairly
 low shares.  Considering this, it can be seen that when users do not
 respond to control, over a prolonged period, the Random Drop
 congestion avoidance mechanism would have an increased probability of
 penalizing users with lower demand.  Their packets dropped, these
 users exert the controls leading to their giving up bandwidth.
 Another problem can be seen to arise in Random Drop [She89] across
 users whose communication paths are of different lengths.  If the
 path spans congested resources at multiple gateways, then the user's
 probability of receiving an unfair drop and subsequent control (if
 cooperating) is exponentially increased.  This is a significant
 scaling problem.
 Unequal paths cause problems for other congestion avoidance policies
 as well.  Selective Feedback Congestion Indication was devised to
 enhance Congestion Indication specifically because of the problem of
 unequal paths.  In Fair Queueing by source-destination pairs, each
 path gets its own queue in all the gateways.

3.3 Congestion Indication

 The Congestion Indication policy is often referred to as the DEC Bit
 policy. It was developed at DEC [JRC87], originally for the Digital
 Network Architecture (DNA).  It has also been specified for the
 congestion avoidance of the ISO protocols TP4 and CLNP [NIST88].
 Like Source Quench, it uses explicit communications from the
 congested gateway to the user.  However, to use the lowest possible
 network resources for indicating congestion, the information is
 communicated in a single bit, the Congestion Experienced Bit, set in
 the network header of the packets already being forwarded by a
 gateway.  Based on the condition of this bit, the end-system user
 makes an adjustment to the sending window. In the NSP transport
 protocol of DECNET, the source makes an adjustment to its window; in
 the ISO transport protocol, TP4, the destination makes this

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 12] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 adjustment in the window offered to the sender.
 This policy attempts to avoid congestion by setting the bit whenever
 the average queue length over the previous queue regeneration cycle
 plus part of the current cycle is one or more.  The feedback is
 determined independently at each resource.

3.4 Selective Feedback Congestion Indication

 The simple Congestion Indication policy works based upon the total
 demand on the gateway.  The total number of users or the fact that
 only a few of the users might be causing congestion is not
 considered.  For fairness, only those users who are sending more than
 their fair share should be asked to reduce their load, while others
 could attempt to increase where possible.  In Selective Feedback
 Congestion Indication, the Congestion Experienced Bit is used to
 carry out this goal.
 Selective Feedback works by keeping a count of the number of packets
 sent by different users since the beginning of the queue averaging
 interval.  This is equivalent to monitoring their throughputs. Based
 on the total throughput, a fair share for each user is determined and
 the congestion bit is set, when congestion approaches, for the users
 whose demand is higher than their fair share.  If the gateway is
 operating below the throughput-delay knee, congestion indications are
 not set.
 A min-max algorithm used to determine the fair share of capacity and
 other details of this policy are described in [RJC87].  One parameter
 to be computed is the capacity of each resource to be divided among
 the users.  This metric depends on the distribution of inter-arrival
 times and packet sizes of the users.  Attempting to determine these
 in real time in the gateway is unacceptable.  The capacity is instead
 estimated from on the throughput seen when the gateway is operating
 in congestion, as indicated by the average queue length.  In
 congestion (above the knee), the service rate of the gateway limits
 its throughput.  Multiplying the throughput obtained at this
 operating point by a capacity factor (between 0.5 and 0.9) to adjust
 for the distributions yields an acceptable capacity estimate in
 simulations.
 Selective Feedback Congestion Indication takes as input a vector of
 the number of packets sent by each source-destination pair of end-
 systems.  Other alternatives include 1) destination address, 2)
 input/output link, and 3) transport connection (source/destination
 addresses and ports).
 These alternatives give different granularities for fairness.  In the

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 13] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 case where paths are the same or round-trip times of users are close
 together, throughputs are equalized similarly by basing the selective
 feedback on source or destination address.  In fact, if the RTTs are
 close enough, the simple congestion indication policy would result in
 a fair allocation.  Counts based on source/destination pairs ensure
 that paths with different lengths and network conditions get a fair
 throughput at the individual gateways.  Counting packets based on
 link pairs has a low overhead, but may result in unfairness to users
 whose demand is below the fair share and are using a long path.
 Counts based on transport layer connection identifiers, if this
 information was available to Internet gateways, would make good
 distinctions, since the differences of demand of different
 applications and instances of applications would be separately
 monitored.
 Problems with Selective Feedback Congestion Indication include that
 the gateway has significant processing to do.  With the feasible
 choice of aggregation at the gateway, unfairness across users within
 the group is likely.  For example, an interactive connection
 aggregated with one or more bulk transfer connections will receive
 congestion indications though its own use of the gateway resources is
 very low.

3.5 Fair Queueing

 Fair Queueing is the policy of maintaining separate gateway output
 queues for individual end-systems by source-destination pair.  In the
 policy as proposed by [Nag85], the gateway's processing and link
 resources are distributed to the end-systems on a round-robin basis.
 On congestion, packets are dropped from the longest queue.  This
 policy leads to equal allocations of resources to each source-
 destination pair.  A source-destination pair that demands more than a
 fair share simply increases its own queueing delay and congestion
 drops.

3.5.1 Bit-Round Fair Queueing

 An enhancement of Nagle Fair Queueing, the Bit-Round Fair Queuing
 algorithm described and simulated by [DKS89] addresses several
 shortcomings of Nagle's scheme. It computes the order of service to
 packets using their lengths, with a technique that emulates a bit-
 by-bit round-robin discipline, so that long packets do not get an
 advantage over short ones.  Otherwise the round-robin would be
 unfair, for example, giving more bandwidth to hosts whose traffic is
 mainly long packets than to hosts sourcing short packets.
 The aggregation of users of a source-destination pair by Fair
 Queueing has the property of grouping the users whose round-trips are

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 14] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 similar. This may be one reason that the combination of Bit-Round
 Fair Queueing with Congestion Indication had particularly good
 simulated performance in [DKS89].
 The aggregation of users has the expected drawbacks, as well.  A
 TELNET user in a queue with an FTP user does not get delay benefits;
 and host pairs with high volume of connections get treated the same
 as a host pair with small number of connections and as a result gets
 unfair services.
 A problem can be mentioned about Fair Queueing, though it is related
 to implementation, and perhaps not properly part of a policy
 discussion.  This is a concern that the resources (processing) used
 for determining where to queue incoming packets would themselves be
 subject to congestion, but not to the benefits of the Fair Queuing
 discipline.  In a situation where the gateway processor was not
 adequate to the demands on it, the gateway would need an alternative
 policy for congestion control of the queue awaiting processing.
 Clever implementation can probably find an efficient way to route
 packets to the queues they belong in before other input processing is
 done, so that processing resources can be controlled, too.  There is
 in addition, the concern that bit-by-bit round FQ requires non-FCFS
 queueing even within the same source destination pairs to allow for
 fairness to different connections between these end systems.
 Another potential concern about Fair Queueing is whether it can scale
 up to gateways with very large source-destination populations.  For
 example, the state in a Fair Queueing implementation scales with the
 number of active end-to-end paths, which will be high in backbone
 gateways.

3.5.2 Stochastic Fairness Queuing

 Stochastic Fairness Queueing (SFQ) has been suggested as a technique
 [McK90] to address the implementation issues relating to Fair
 Queueing.  The first overhead that is reduced is that of looking up
 the source-destination address pair in an incoming packet and
 determining which queue that packet will have to be placed in.  SFQ
 does not require as many memory accesses as Fair Queueing to place
 the packet in the appropriate queue.  SFQ is thus claimed to be more
 amenable to implementation for high-speed networks [McK90].
 SFQ uses a simple hash function to map from the source-destination
 address pair to a fixed set of queues.  Since the assignment of an
 address pair to a queue is probabilistic, there is the likelihood of
 multiple address pairs colliding and mapping to the same queue.  This
 would potentially degrade the additional fairness that is gained with
 Fairness Queueing.  If two or more address pairs collide, they would

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 15] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 continue to do so.  To deal with the situation when such a collision
 occurs, SFQ periodically perturbs the hash function so that these
 address pairs will be unlikely to collide subsequently.
 The price paid for achieving this implementation efficiency is that
 SFQ requires a potentially large number of queues (we must note
 however, that these queues may be organized orthogonally from the
 buffers in which packets are stored. The buffers themselves may be
 drawn from a common pool, and buffers in each queue organized as a
 linked list pointed to from each queue header).  For example, [McK90]
 indicates that to get good, consistent performance, we may need to
 have up to 5 to 10 times the number of active source-destination
 pairs. In a typical gateway, this may require around 1000 to 2000
 queues.
 [McK90] reports simulation results with SFQ. The particular hash
 function that is studied is using the HDLC's cyclic redundancy check
 (CRC).  The hash function is perturbed by multiplying each byte by a
 sequence number in the range 1 to 255 before applying the CRC.  The
 metric considered is the standard deviation of the number of packets
 output per source-destination pair.  A perfectly fair policy would
 have a standard deviation of zero and an unfair policy would have a
 large standard deviation.  In the example studied (which has up to 20
 source-destination (s-d) pairs going through a single overloaded
 gateway), SFQ with 1280 queues (i.e., 64 times the number of source-
 destination pairs), approaches about 3 times the standard deviation
 of Fairness Queueing.  This must be compared to a FCFS queueing
 discipline having a standard deviation which is almost 175 times the
 standard deviation of Fairness Queueing.
 It is conjectured in [McK90] that a good value for the interval in
 between perturbations of the hash function appears to be in the area
 between twice the queue flush time of the stochastic fairness queue
 and one-tenth the average conversation time between a source-
 destination pair.
 SFQ also may alleviate the anticipated scaling problems that may be
 an issue with Fair Queueing by not strictly requiring the number of
 queues equal to the possible source-destination pairs that may be
 presenting a load on a particular gateway. However, SFQ achieves this
 property by trading off some of the fairness for implementation
 efficiency.
 [McK90] examines alternative strategies for implementation of Fair
 Queueing and SFQ and estimates their complexity on common hardware
 platforms (e.g., a Motorola 68020).  It is suggested that mapping an
 IP address pair may require around 24 instructions per packet for
 Fair Queueing in the best case; in contrast SFQ requires 10

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 16] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 instructions in the worst case.  The primary source of this gain is
 that SFQ avoids a comparison of the s-d address pair on the packet to
 the identity of the queue header.  The relative benefit of SFQ over
 Fair Queueing is anticipated to be greater when the addresses are
 longer.
 SFQ offers promising implemenatation benefits.  However, the price to
 be paid in terms of having a significantly larger number of queues
 (and the consequent data structures and their management) than the
 number of s-d pairs placing a load on the gateway is a concern.  SFQ
 is also attractive in that it may be used in concert with the DEC-bit
 scheme for Selective Feedback Congestion Indication to provide
 fairness as well as congestion avoidance.

4. END-SYSTEM CONGESTION CONTROL POLICIES

 Ideally in gateway congestion control, the end-system transport
 entities adjust (decrease) their demand in response to control
 exerted by the gateway.  Schemes have been put in practice for
 transport entities to adjust their demand dynamically in response to
 congestion feedback.  To accomplish this, in general, they call for
 the user to gradually increase demand until information is received
 that the load on the gateway is too high.  In response to this
 information, the user decreases load, then begins an exploratory
 increases again.  This cycle is repeated continuously, with the goal
 that the total demand will oscillate around the optimal level.
 We have already noted that a Slow-start connection may give up
 considerable bandwidth when sharing a gateway with aggressive
 transport entities.  There is currently no way to enforce that end-
 systems use a congestion avoidance policy, though the Host
 Requirements RFC [HR89] has defined Slow-start as mandatory for TCP.
 This adverse effect on Slow-start connections is mitigated by the
 Fair Queueing policy.  Our conclusions discuss further the
 coexistence of different end-system strategies.
 This section briefly presents two fielded transport congestion
 control and avoidance schemes, Slow-start and End-System Congestion
 Indication, and the responses by means of which they cooperate with
 gateway policies.  They both use the control paradigm described
 above.  Slow-start, as mentioned in Section 1, was developed by
 [Jac88], and widely fielded in the BSD TCP implementation.  End-
 system Congestion Indication was developed by [JRC87].  It is fielded
 in DEC's Digital Network Architecture, and has been specified as well
 for ISO TP4 [NIST88].
 Both Slow-start and End-system Congestion Indication view the
 relationship between users and gateways as a control system. They

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 17] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 have feedback and control components, the latter further broken down
 into a procedure bringing a new connection to equilibrium, and a
 procedure to maintain demand at the proper level.  They make use of
 policies for increasing and decreasing the transport sender's window
 size.  These require the sender to follow a set of self-restraining
 rules which dynamically adjust the send window whenever congestion is
 sensed.
 A predecessor of these, CUTE, developed by [Jai86], introduced the
 use of retransmission timeouts as congestion feedback.  The Slow-
 start scheme was also designed to use timeouts in the same way.  The
 End-System policies for Congestion Indication use the Congestion
 Experienced Bit delivered in the network header as the primary
 feedback, but retransmission timeouts also provoke an end-system
 congestion response.
 In reliable transport protocols like TCP and TP4, the retransmission
 timer must do its best to satisfy two conflicting goals. On one hand,
 the timer must rapidly detect lost packets. And, on the other hand,
 the timer must minimize false alarms.  Since the retransmit timer is
 used as a congestion signal in these end-system policies, it is all
 the more important that timeouts reliably correspond to packet drops.
 One important rule for retransmission is to avoid bad sampling in the
 measurements that will be used in estimating the round-trip delay.
 [KP87] describes techniques to ensure accurate sampling.  The Host
 Requirements RFC [HR89] makes these techniques mandatory for TCP.
 The utilization of a resource can be defined as the ratio of its
 average arrival rate to its mean service rate. This metric varies
 between 0 and 1.0. In a state of congestion, one or more resources
 (link, gateway buffer, gateway CPU) has a utilization approaching
 1.0.  The average delay (round trip time) and its variance approach
 infinity. Therefore, as the utilization of a network increases, it
 becomes increasingly important to take into account the variance of
 the round trip time in estimating it for the retransmission timeout.
 The TCP retransmission timer is based on an estimate of the round
 trip time.  [Jac88] calls the round trip time estimator the single
 most important feature of any protocol implementation that expects to
 survive a heavy load. The retransmit timeout procedure in RFC-793
 [Pos81b] includes a fixed parameter, beta, to account for the
 variance in the delay. An estimate of round trip time using the
 suggested values for beta is valid for a network which is at most 30%
 utilized.  Thus, the RFC-793 retransmission timeout estimator will
 fail under heavy congestion, causing unnecessary retransmissions that
 add to the load, and making congestive loss detection impossible.
 Slow-start TCP uses the mean deviation as an estimate of the variance

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 18] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 to improve the estimate. As a rough view of what happens with the
 Slow-start retransmission calculation, delays can change by
 approximately two standard deviations without the timer going off in
 a false alarm.  The same method of estimation may be applicable to
 TP4.  The procedure is:
         Error     = Measured - Estimated
         Estimated = Estimated + Gain_1 * Error
         Deviation = Deviation + Gain_2 * (|Error| - Deviation)
         Timeout   = Estimated + 2 * Deviation
         Where:  Gain_1, Gain_2 are gain factors.

4.1 Response to No Policy in Gateway

 Since packets must be dropped during congestion because of the finite
 buffer space, feedback of congestion to the users exists even when
 there is no gateway congestion policy.  Dropping the packets is an
 attempt to recover from congestion, though it needs to be noted that
 congestion collapse is not prevented by packet drops if end-systems
 accelerate their sending rate in these conditions.  The accurate
 detection of congestive loss by all retransmission timers in the
 end-systems is extremely important for gateway congestion recovery.

4.2 Response to Source Quench

 Given that a Source Quench message has ambiguous meaning, but usually
 is issued for congestion recovery, the response of Slow-start to a
 Source Quench is to return to the beginning of the cycle of increase.
 This is an early response, since the Source Quench on overflow will
 also lead to a retransmission timeout later.

4.3 Response to Random Drop

 The end-system's view of Random Drop is the same as its view of loss
 caused by overflow at the gateway. This is a drawback of the use of
 packet drops as congestion feedback for congestion avoidance: the
 decrease policy on congestion feedback cannot be made more drastic
 for overflows than for the drops the gateway does for congestion
 avoidance.  Slow-start responds rapidly to gateway feedback.  In a
 case where the users are cooperating (all Slow-start), a desired
 outcome would be that this responsiveness would lead quickly to a
 decreased probability of drop.  There would be, as an ideal, a self-
 adjusting overall amount of control.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 19] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

4.4 Response to Congestion Indication

 Since the Congestion Indication mechanism attempts to keep gateways
 uncongested, cooperating end-system congestion control policies need
 not reduce demand as much as with other gateway policies.  The
 difference between the Slow-start response to packet drops and the
 End-System Congestion Indication response to Congestion Experienced
 Bits is primarily in the decrease policy.  Slow-start decreases the
 window to one packet on a retransmission timeout.  End-System
 Congestion Indication decreases the window by a fraction (for
 instance, to 7/8 of the original value), when the Congestion
 Experienced Bit is set in half of the packets in a sample spanning
 two round-trip times (two windows full).

4.5 Response to Fair Queuing

 A Fair Queueing policy may issue control indications, as in the
 simulated Bit-Round Fair Queueing with DEC Bit, or it may depend only
 on the passive effects of the queueing.  When the passive control is
 the main effect (perhaps because most users are not responsive to
 control indications), the behavior of retransmission timers will be
 very important.  If retransmitting users send more packets in
 response to increases in their delay and drops, Fair Queueing will be
 prone to degraded performance, though collapse (zero throughput for
 all users) may be prevented for a longer period of time.

5. Conclusions

 The impact of users with excessive demand is a driving force as
 proposed gateway policies come closer to implementation.  Random Drop
 and Congestion Indication can be fair only if the transport entities
 sharing the gateway are all cooperative and reduce demand as needed.
 Within some portions of the Internet, good behavior of end-systems
 eventually may be enforced through administration.  But for various
 reasons, we can expect non-cooperating transports to be a persistent
 population in the Internet.  Congestion avoidance mechanisms will not
 be deployed all at once, even if they are adopted as standards.
 Without enforcement, or even with penalties for excessive demand,
 some end-systems will never implement congestion avoidance
 mechanisms.
 Since it is outside the context of any of the gateway policies, we
 will mention here a suggestion for a relatively small-scale response
 to users which implement especially aggressive policies. This has
 been made experimentally by [Jac89].  It would implement a low
 priority queue, to which the majority of traffic is not routed.  The
 candidate traffic to be queued there would be identified by a cache
 of recent recipients of whatever control indications the gateway

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 20] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 policy makes.  Remaining in the cache over multiple control intervals
 is the criterion for being routed to the low priority queue.  In
 approaching or established congestion, the bandwidth given to the
 low-service queue is decreased.
 The goal of end-system cooperation itself has been questioned.  As
 [She89] points out, it is difficult to define.  A TCP implementation
 that retransmits before it determines that has been loss indicated
 and in a Go-Back-N manner is clearly non-cooperating.  On the other
 hand, a transport entity with selective acknowledgement may demand
 more from the gateways than TCP, even while responding to congestion
 in a cooperative way.
 Fair Queueing maintains its control of allocations regardless of the
 end-system congestion avoidance policies.  [Nag85] and [DKS89] argue
 that the extra delays and congestion drops that result from
 misbehavior could work to enforce good end-system policies.  Are the
 rewards and penalties less sharply defined when one or more
 misbehaving systems cause the whole gateway's performance to be less?
 While the tax on all users imposed by the "over-users" is much less
 than in gateways with other policies, how can it be made sufficiently
 low?
 In the sections on Selective Feedback Congestion Indication and Bit-
 Round Fair Queueing we have pointed out that more needs to be done on
 two particular fronts:
    How can increased computational overhead be avoided?
    The allocation of resources to source-destination pairs is, in
    many scenarios, unfair to individual users. Bit-Round Fair
    Queueing offers a potential administrative remedy, but even if it
    is applied, how should the unequal allocations be propagated
    through multiple gateways?
 The first question has been taken up by [McK90].
 Since Selective Feedback Congestion Indication (or Congestion
 Indication used with Fair Queueing) uses a network bit, its use in
 the Internet requires protocol support; the transition of some
 portions of the Internet to OSI protocols may make such a change
 attractive in the future.  The interactions between heterogeneous
 congestion control policies in the Internet will need to be explored.
 The goals of Random Drop Congestion Avoidance are presented in this
 survey, but without any claim that the problems of this policy can be
 solved.  These goals themselves, of uniform, dynamic treatment of
 users (streams/flows), of low overhead, and of good scaling

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 21] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 characteristics in large and loaded networks, are significant.

Appendix: Congestion and Connection-oriented Subnets

 This section presents a recommendation for gateway implementation in
 an areas that unavoidably interacts with gateway congestion control,
 the impact of connection-oriented subnets, such as those based on
 X.25.
 The need to manage a connection oriented service (X.25) in order to
 transport datagram traffic (IP) can cause problems for gateway
 congestion control.  Being a pure datagram protocol, IP provides no
 information delimiting when a pair of IP entities need to establish a
 session between themselves.  The solution involves compromise among
 delay, cost, and resources.  Delay is introduced by call
 establishment when a new X.25 SVC (Switched Virtual Circuit) needs to
 be established, and also by queueing delays for the physical line.
 Cost includes any charges by the X.25 network service provider.
 Besides the resources most gateways have (CPU, memory, links), a
 maximum supported or permitted number of virtual circuits may be in
 contest.
 SVCs are established on demand when an IP packet needs to be sent and
 there is no SVC established or pending establishment to the
 destination IP entity.  Optionally, when cost considerations, and
 sufficient numbers of unused virtual circuits allow, redundant SVCs
 may be established between the same pair of IP entities.  Redundant
 SVCs can have the effect of improving performance when coping with
 large end-to-end delay, small maximum packet sizes and small maximum
 packet windows.  It is generally preferred though, to negotiate large
 packet sizes and packet windows on a single SVC.  Redundant SVCs must
 especially be discouraged when virtual circuit resources are small
 compared with the number of destination IP entities among the active
 users of the gateway.
 SVCs are closed after some period of inactivity indicates that
 communication may have been suspended between the IP entities.  This
 timeout is significant in the operation of the interface.  Setting
 the value too low can result in closing of the SVC even though the
 traffic has not stopped.  This results in potentially large delays
 for the packets which reopen the SVC and may also incur charges
 associated with SVC calls.  Also, clearing of SVCs is, by definition,
 nongraceful.  If an SVC is closed before the last packets are
 acknowledged, there is no guarantee of delivery.  Packet losses are
 introduced by this destructive close independent of gateway traffic
 and congestion.
 When a new circuit is needed and all available circuits are currently

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 22] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 in use, there is a temptation to pick one to close (possibly using
 some Least Recently Used criterion).  But if connectivity demands are
 larger than available circuit resources, this strategy can lead to a
 type of thrashing where circuits are constantly being closed and
 reopened.  In the worst case, a circuit is opened, a single packet
 sent and the circuit closed (without a guarantee of packet delivery).
 To counteract this, each circuit should be allowed to remain open a
 minimum amount of time.
 One possible SVC strategy is to dynamically change the time a circuit
 will be allowed to remain open based on the number of circuits in
 use.  Three administratively controlled variables are used, a minimum
 time, a maximum time and an adaptation factor in seconds per
 available circuit.  In this scheme, a circuit is closed after it has
 been idle for a time period equal to the minimum plus the adaptation
 factor times the number of available circuits, limited by the maximum
 time.  By administratively adjusting these variables, one has
 considerable flexibility in adjusting the SVC utilization to meet the
 needs of a specific gateway.

Acknowledgements

 This paper is the outcome of discussions in the Performance and
 Congestion Control Working Group between April 1988 and July 1989.
 Both PCC WG and plenary IETF members gave us helpful reviews of
 earlier drafts.  Several of the ideas described here were contributed
 by the members of the PCC WG.  The Appendix was written by Art
 Berggreen.  We are particularly thankful also to Van Jacobson, Scott
 Shenker, Bruce Schofield, Paul McKenney, Matt Mathis, Geof Stone, and
 Lixia Zhang for participation and reviews.

References

 [DKS89] Demers, A., Keshav, S., and S. Shenker, "Analysis and
 Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm", Proceedings of SIGCOMM '89.
 [Fin89] Finn, G., "A Connectionless Congestion Control Algorithm",
 Computer Communications Review, Vol. 19, No. 5, October 1989.
 [Gar87] Gardner, M., "BBN Report on the ARPANET", Proceedings of the
 McLean IETF, SRI-NIC IETF-87/3P, July 1987.
 [GREQ87] Braden R., and J. Postel, "Requirements for Internet
 Gateways", RFC 1009, USC/Information Sciences Institute, June 1987.
 [HREQ89] Braden R., Editor, "Requirements for Internet Hosts --
 Communications Layers", RFC 1122, Internet Engineering Task Force,
 October 1989.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 23] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 [Has90] Hashem, E., "Random Drop Congestion Control", M.S. Thesis,
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Computer
 Science, 1990.
 [Jac88] Jacobson, V., "Congestion Avoidance and Control", Proceedings
 of SIGCOMM '88.
 [Jac89] Jacobson, V., "Presentations to the IETF Performance and
 Congestion Control Working Group".
 [Jaf81] Jaffe, J., "Bottleneck Flow Control", IEEE Transactions on
 Communications, COM-29(7), July, 1981.
 [Jai86] Jain, R., "A Timeout-based Congestion Control Scheme for
 Window Flow-controlled Networks", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
 Communications, SAC-4(7), October 1986.
 [JRC87] Jain, R., Ramakrishnan, K., and D. Chiu, "Congestion
 Avoidance in Computer Networks With a Connectionless Network Layer",
 Technical Report DEC-TR-506, Digital Equipment Corporation.
 [Kle79] Kleinrock, L., "Power and Deterministic Rules of Thumb for
 Probabilistic Problems in Computer Communications",  Proceedings of
 the ICC '79.
 [KP87] Karn, P., and C. Partridge, "Improving Round Trip Estimates in
 Reliable Transport Protocols", Proceedings of SIGCOMM '87.
 [Man90] Mankin, A., "Random Drop Congestion Control", Proceedings of
 SIGCOMM '90.
 [McK90] McKenney, P., "Stochastic Fairness Queueing", Proceedings of
 INFOCOM '90.
 [Nag84] Nagle, J., "Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks", RFC
 896, FACC Palo Alto, 6 January 1984.
 [Nag85] Nagle, J., "On Packet Switches With Infinite Storage", RFC
 970, FACC Palo Alto, December 1985.
 [NIST88] NIST, "Stable Implementation Agreements for OSI Protocols,
 Version 2, Edition 1", National Institute of Standards and Technology
 Special Publication 500-162, December 1988.
 [Pos81a] Postel, J., "Internet Control Message Protocol - DARPA
 Internet Program Protocol Specification", RFC-792, USC/Information
 Sciences Institute, September 1981.

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 24] RFC 1254 Gateway Congestion Control Survey August 1991

 [Pos81b] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol - DARPA Internet
 Program Protocol Specification", RFC-793, DARPA, September 1981.
 [RJC87] Ramakrishnan, K., Jain, R., and D. Chiu, "A Selective Binary
 Feedback Scheme for General Topologies", Technical Report DEC-TR-510,
 Digital Equipment Corporation.
 [She89] Shenker, S., "Correspondence with the IETF Performance and
 Congestion Control Working Group".
 [Sp89] Spector, A., and M. Kazar, "Uniting File Systems", Unix
 Review, Vol.  7, No. 3, March 1989.
 [Zha89] Zhang, L., "A New Architecture for Packet Switching Network
 Protocols", Ph.D Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
 Department of Computer Science, 1989.

Security Considerations

 Security issues are not discussed in this memo.

Authors' Addresses

 Allison Mankin
 The MITRE Corporation
 M/S W425
 7525 Colshire Drive
 McLean, VA  22102
 Email: mankin@gateway.mitre.org
 K.K. Ramakrishnan
 Digital Equipment Corporation
 M/S LKG1-2/A19
 550 King Street
 Littleton, MA  01754
 Email: rama@kalvi.enet.dec.com

Performance and Congestion Control Working Group [Page 25]

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