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rfc:rfc2598

Network Working Group V. Jacobson Request for Comments: 2598 K. Nichols Category: Standards Track Cisco Systems

                                                             K. Poduri
                                                          Bay Networks
                                                             June 1999
                    An Expedited Forwarding PHB

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

 The definition of PHBs (per-hop forwarding behaviors) is a critical
 part of the work of the Diffserv Working Group.  This document
 describes a PHB called Expedited Forwarding. We show the generality
 of this PHB by noting that it can be produced by more than one
 mechanism and give an example of its use to produce at least one
 service, a Virtual Leased Line.  A recommended codepoint for this PHB
 is given.
 A pdf version of this document is available at
 ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/ef_phb.pdf

1. Introduction

 Network nodes that implement the differentiated services enhancements
 to IP use a codepoint in the IP header to select a per-hop behavior
 (PHB) as the specific forwarding treatment for that packet [RFC2474,
 RFC2475].  This memo describes a particular PHB called expedited
 forwarding (EF). The EF PHB can be used to build a low loss, low
 latency, low jitter, assured bandwidth, end-to-end service through DS
 domains.  Such a service appears to the endpoints like a point-to-
 point connection or a "virtual leased line".  This service has also
 been described as Premium service [2BIT].

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

 Loss, latency and jitter are all due to the queues traffic
 experiences while transiting the network.  Therefore providing low
 loss, latency and jitter for some traffic aggregate means ensuring
 that the aggregate sees no (or very small) queues. Queues arise when
 (short-term) traffic arrival rate exceeds departure rate at some
 node.  Thus a service that ensures no queues for some aggregate is
 equivalent to bounding rates such that, at every transit node, the
 aggregate's maximum arrival rate is less than that aggregate's
 minimum departure rate.
 Creating such a service has two parts:
    1) Configuring nodes so that the aggregate has a well-defined
       minimum departure rate. ("Well-defined" means independent of
       the dynamic state of the node.  In particular, independent of
       the intensity of other traffic at the node.)
    2) Conditioning the aggregate (via policing and shaping) so that
       its arrival rate at any node is always less than that node's
       configured minimum departure rate.
 The EF PHB provides the first part of the service.  The network
 boundary traffic conditioners described in [RFC2475] provide the
 second part.
 The EF PHB is not a mandatory part of the Differentiated Services
 architecture, i.e., a node is not required to implement the EF PHB in
 order to be considered DS-compliant.  However, when a DS-compliant
 node claims to implement the EF PHB, the implementation must conform
 to the specification given in this document.
 The next sections describe the EF PHB in detail and give examples of
 how it might be implemented.  The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT",
 "REQUIRED", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", and "MAY" that appear in this
 document are to be interpreted as described in [Bradner97].

2. Description of EF per-hop behavior

 The EF PHB is defined as a forwarding treatment for a particular
 diffserv aggregate where the departure rate of the aggregate's
 packets from any diffserv node must equal or exceed a configurable
 rate.  The EF traffic SHOULD receive this rate independent of the
 intensity of any other traffic attempting to transit the node.  It
 SHOULD average at least the configured rate when measured over any
 time interval equal to or longer than the time it takes to send an
 output link MTU sized packet at the configured rate.  (Behavior at
 time scales shorter than a packet time at the configured rate is

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 2] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

 deliberately not specified.) The configured minimum rate MUST be
 settable by a network administrator (using whatever mechanism the
 node supports for non-volatile configuration).
 If the EF PHB is implemented by a mechanism that allows unlimited
 preemption of other traffic (e.g., a priority queue), the
 implementation MUST include some means to limit the damage EF traffic
 could inflict on other traffic (e.g., a token bucket rate limiter).
 Traffic that exceeds this limit MUST be discarded. This maximum EF
 rate, and burst size if appropriate, MUST be settable by a network
 administrator (using whatever mechanism the node supports for non-
 volatile configuration). The minimum and maximum rates may be the
 same and configured by a single parameter.
 The Appendix describes how this PHB can be used to construct end-to-
 end services.

2.2 Example Mechanisms to Implement the EF PHB

 Several types of queue scheduling mechanisms may be employed to
 deliver the forwarding behavior described in section 2.1 and thus
 implement the EF PHB. A simple priority queue will give the
 appropriate behavior as long as there is no higher priority queue
 that could preempt the EF for more than a packet time at the
 configured rate.  (This could be accomplished by having a rate
 policer such as a token bucket associated with each priority queue to
 bound how much the queue can starve other traffic.)
 It's also possible to use a single queue in a group of queues
 serviced by a weighted round robin scheduler where the share of the
 output bandwidth assigned to the EF queue is equal to the configured
 rate.  This could be implemented, for example, using one PHB of a
 Class Selector Compliant set of PHBs [RFC2474].
 Another possible implementation is a CBQ [CBQ] scheduler that gives
 the EF queue priority up to the configured rate.
 All of these mechanisms have the basic properties required for the EF
 PHB though different choices result in different ancillary behavior
 such as jitter seen by individual microflows. See Appendix A.3 for
 simulations that quantify some of these differences.

2.3 Recommended codepoint for this PHB

 Codepoint 101110 is recommended for the EF PHB.

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 3] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

2.4 Mutability

 Packets marked for EF PHB MAY be remarked at a DS domain boundary
 only to other codepoints that satisfy the EF PHB.  Packets marked for
 EF PHBs SHOULD NOT be demoted or promoted to another PHB by a DS
 domain.

2.5 Tunneling

 When EF packets are tunneled, the tunneling packets must be marked as
 EF.

2.6 Interaction with other PHBs

 Other PHBs and PHB groups may be deployed in the same DS node or
 domain with the EF PHB as long as the requirement of section 2.1 is
 met.

3. Security Considerations

 To protect itself against denial of service attacks, the edge of a DS
 domain MUST strictly police all EF marked packets to a rate
 negotiated with the adjacent upstream domain.  (This rate must be <=
 the EF PHB configured rate.)  Packets in excess of the negotiated
 rate MUST be dropped.  If two adjacent domains have not negotiated an
 EF rate, the downstream domain MUST use 0 as the rate (i.e., drop all
 EF marked packets).
 Since the end-to-end premium service constructed from the EF PHB
 requires that the upstream domain police and shape EF marked traffic
 to meet the rate negotiated with the downstream domain, the
 downstream domain's policer should never have to drop packets.  Thus
 these drops SHOULD be noted (e.g., via SNMP traps) as possible
 security violations or serious misconfiguration. Similarly, since the
 aggregate EF traffic rate is constrained at every interior node, the
 EF queue should never overflow so if it does the drops SHOULD be
 noted as possible attacks or serious misconfiguration.

4. IANA Considerations

 This document allocates one codepoint, 101110, in Pool 1 of the code
 space defined by [RFC2474].

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 4] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

5. References

 [Bradner97] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
             Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
 [RFC2474]   Nichols, K., Blake, S., Baker, F. and D. Black,
             "Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS
             Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers", RFC 2474, December
             1998.
 [RFC2475]   Black, D., Blake, S., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, Z.
             and W. Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated
             Services", RFC 2475, December 1998.
 [2BIT]      K. Nichols, V. Jacobson, and L. Zhang, "A Two-bit
             Differentiated Services Architecture for the Internet",
             Work in Progress, ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/papers/dsarch.pdf
 [CBQ]       S. Floyd and V. Jacobson, "Link-sharing and Resource
             Management Models for Packet Networks", IEEE/ACM
             Transactions on Networking, Vol. 3 no. 4, pp. 365-386,
             August 1995.
 [RFC2415]   Poduri, K. and K. Nichols, "Simulation Studies of
             Increased Initial TCP Window Size", RFC 2415, September
             1998.
 [LCN]       K. Nichols, "Improving Network Simulation with Feedback",
             Proceedings of LCN '98, October 1998.

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 5] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

6. Authors' Addresses

 Van Jacobson
 Cisco Systems, Inc
 170 W. Tasman Drive
 San Jose, CA 95134-1706
 EMail: van@cisco.com
 Kathleen Nichols
 Cisco Systems, Inc
 170 W. Tasman Drive
 San Jose, CA 95134-1706
 EMail: kmn@cisco.com
 Kedarnath Poduri
 Bay Networks, Inc.
 4401 Great America Parkway
 Santa Clara, CA 95052-8185
 EMail: kpoduri@baynetworks.com

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 6] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

Appendix A: Example use of and experiences with the EF PHB

A.1 Virtual Leased Line Service

 A VLL Service, also known as Premium service [2BIT], is quantified by
 a peak bandwidth.

A.2 Experiences with its use in ESNET

 A prototype of the VLL service has been deployed on DOE's ESNet
 backbone.  This uses weighted-round-robin queuing features of Cisco
 75xx series routers to implement the EF PHB. The early tests have
 been very successful and work is in progress to make the service
 available on a routine production basis (see
 ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/talks/vj-doeqos.pdf and
 ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/talks/vj-i2qos-may98.pdf for details).

A.3 Simulation Results

A.3.1 Jitter variation

 In section 2.2, we pointed out that a number of mechanisms might be
 used to implement the EF PHB. The simplest of these is a priority
 queue (PQ) where the arrival rate of the queue is strictly less than
 its service rate. As jitter comes from the queuing delay along the
 path, a feature of this implementation is that EF-marked microflows
 will see very little jitter at their subscribed rate since packets
 spend little time in queues. The EF PHB does not have an explicit
 jitter requirement but it is clear from the definition that the
 expected jitter in a packet stream that uses a service based on the
 EF PHB will be less with PQ than with best-effort delivery. We used
 simulation to explore how weighted round-robin (WRR) compares to PQ
 in jitter. We chose these two since they"re the best and worst cases,
 respectively, for jitter and we wanted to supply rough guidelines for
 EF implementers choosing to use WRR or similar mechanisms.
 Our simulation model is implemented in a modified ns-2 described in
 [RFC2415] and [LCN]. We used the CBQ modules included with ns-2 as a
 basis to implement priority queuing and WRR. Our topology has six
 hops with decreasing bandwidth in the direction of a single 1.5 Mbps
 bottleneck link (see figure 6). Sources produce EF-marked packets at
 an average bit rate equal to their subscribed packet rate. Packets
 are produced with a variation of +-10% from the interpacket spacing
 at the subscribed packet rate.  The individual source rates were
 picked aggregate to 30% of the bottleneck link or 450 Kbps. A mixture
 of FTPs and HTTPs is then used to fill the link. Individual EF packet
 sources produce either all 160 byte packets or all 1500 byte packets.

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 7] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

 Though we present the statistics of flows with one size of packet,
 all of the experiments used a mixture of short and long packet EF
 sources so the EF queues had a mix of both packet lengths.
 We defined jitter as the absolute value of the difference between the
 arrival times of two adjacent packets minus their departure times,
 |(aj-dj) - (ai-di)|. For the target flow of each experiment, we
 record the median and 90th percentile values of jitter (expressed as
 % of the subscribed EF rate) in a table. The pdf version of this
 document contains graphs of the jitter percentiles.
 Our experiments compared the jitter of WRR and PQ implementations of
 the EF PHB. We assessed the effect of different choices of WRR queue
 weight and number of queues on jitter. For WRR, we define the
 service-to-arrival rate ratio as the service rate of the EF queue (or
 the queue"s minimum share of the output link) times the output link
 bandwidth divided by the peak arrival rate of EF-marked packets at
 the queue. Results will not be stable if the WRR weight is chosen to
 exactly balance arrival and departure rates thus we used a minimum
 service-to-arrival ratio of 1.03. In our simulations this means that
 the EF queue gets at least 31% of the output links. In WRR
 simulations we kept the link full with other traffic as described
 above, splitting the non-EF-marked traffic among the non-EF queues.
 (It should be clear from the experiment description that we are
 attempting to induce worst-case jitter and do not expect these
 settings or traffic to represent a "normal" operating point.)
 Our first set of experiments uses the minimal service-to-arrival
 ratio of 1.06 and we vary the number of individual microflows
 composing the EF aggregate from 2 to 36. We compare these to a PQ
 implementation with 24 flows. First, we examine a microflow at a
 subscribed rate of 56 Kbps sending 1500 byte packets, then one at the
 same rate but sending 160 byte packets. Table 1 shows the 50th and
 90th percentile jitter in percent of a packet time at the subscribed
 rate. Figure 1 plots the 1500 byte flows and figure 2 the 160 byte
 flows.  Note that a packet-time for a 1500 byte packet at 56 Kbps is
 214 ms, for a 160 byte packet 23 ms. The jitter for the large packets
 rarely exceeds half a subscribed rate packet-time, though most
 jitters for the small packets are at least one subscribed rate
 packet-time. Keep in mind that the EF aggregate is a mixture of small
 and large packets in all cases so short packets can wait for long
 packets in the EF queue. PQ gives a very low jitter.
 Table 1: Variation in jitter with number of EF flows: Service/arrival
 ratio of 1.06 and subscription rate of 56 Kbps (all values given as %
 of subscribed rate)

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 8] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

                         1500 byte pack. 160 byte packet
             # EF flows  50th %  90th %  50th %  90th %
              PQ (24)     1       5       17      43
                 2       11      47       96     513
                 4       12      35      100     278
                 8       10      25       96     126
                 24      18      47       96     143
 Next we look at the effects of increasing the service-to-arrival
 ratio. This means that EF packets should remain enqueued for less
 time though the bandwidth available to the other queues remains the
 same.  In this set of experiments the number of flows in the EF
 aggregate was fixed at eight and the total number of queues at five
 (four non-EF queues). Table 2 shows the results for 1500 and 160 byte
 flows.  Figures 3 plots the 1500 byte results and figure 4 the 160
 byte results. Performance gains leveled off at service-to-arrival
 ratios of 1.5. Note that the higher service-to-arrival ratios do not
 give the same performance as PQ, but now 90% of packets experience
 less than a subscribed packet-time of jitter even for the small
 packets.
 Table 2: Variation in Jitter of EF flows: service/arrival ratio
 varies, 8 flow aggregate, 56 Kbps subscribed rate
                 WRR     1500 byte pack. 160 byte packet
                 Ser/Arr 50th %  90th %  50th %  90th %
                  PQ      1       3       17      43
                 1.03    14      27      100     178
                 1.30     7      21       65     113
                 1.50     5      13       57     104
                 1.70     5      13       57     100
                 2.00     5      13       57     104
                 3.00     5      13       57     100
 Increasing the number of queues at the output interfaces can lead to
 more variability in the service time for EF packets so we carried out
 an experiment varying the number of queues at each output port. We
 fixed the number of flows in the aggregate to eight and used the
 minimal 1.03 service-to-arrival ratio. Results are shown in figure 5
 and table 3.  Figure 5 includes PQ with 8 flows as a baseline.

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 9] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

 Table 3: Variation in Jitter with Number of Queues at Output
 Interface: Service-to-arrival ratio is 1.03, 8 flow aggregate
                 # EF    1500 byte packet
                 flows   50th %  90th %
                 PQ (8)   1       3
                   2      7      21
                   4      7      21
                   6      8      22
                   8     10      23
 It appears that most jitter for WRR is low and can be reduced by a
 proper choice of the EF queue's WRR share of the output link with
 respect to its subscribed rate.  As noted, WRR is a worst case while
 PQ is the best case. Other possibilities include WFQ or CBQ with a
 fixed rate limit for the EF queue but giving it priority over other
 queues. We expect the latter to have performance nearly identical
 with PQ though future simulations are needed to verify this. We have
 not yet systematically explored effects of hop count, EF allocations
 other than 30% of the link bandwidth, or more complex topologies. The
 information in this section is not part of the EF PHB definition but
 provided simply as background to guide implementers.

A.3.2 VLL service

 We used simulation to see how well a VLL service built from the EF
 PHB behaved, that is, does it look like a `leased line' at the
 subscribed rate. In the simulations of the last section, none of the
 EF packets were dropped in the network and the target rate was always
 achieved for those CBR sources. However, we wanted to see if VLL
 really looks like a `wire' to a TCP using it. So we simulated long-
 lived FTPs using a VLL service. Table 4 gives the percentage of each
 link allocated to EF traffic (bandwidths are lower on the links with
 fewer EF microflows), the subscribed VLL rate, the average rate for
 the same type of sender-receiver pair connected by a full duplex
 dedicated link at the subscribed rate and the average of the VLL
 flows for each simulation (all sender-receiver pairs had the same
 value). Losses only occur when the input shaping buffer overflows but
 not in the network.  The target rate is not achieved due to the
 well-known TCP behavior.
           Table 4: Performance of FTPs using a VLL service
              % link     Average delivered rate (Kbps)
              to EF   Subscribed      Dedicated       VLL
              20      100             90              90
              40      150             143             143
              60      225             213             215

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 10] RFC 2598 An Expedited Forwarding PHB June 1999

Full Copyright Statement

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.
 This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
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 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
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 followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
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 The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
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 TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
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Acknowledgement

 Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
 Internet Society.

Jacobson, et al. Standards Track [Page 11]

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