Coding and congestion control in transport

There are cases where deploying FEC coding improves the performance of a transmission. As an example, it may take time for the sender to detect transfer tail losses (losses that occur at the end of a transfer, where e.g., TCP obtains no more ACKs to repair the loss via retransmission quickly). Allowing the receiver to recover such losses instead of having to rely on a retransmission could improve the experience of applications using short flows. Another example are networks where non-congestion losses are persistent and prevent a sender from exploiting the link capacity. Coding is a reliability mechanism that is distinct and separate from the loss detection of congestion controls. defines TCP as a loss-based congestion control; since FEC coding repairs such losses, blindly applying it may easily lead to an implementation that also hides a congestion signal from the sender. It is important to ensure that such information hiding does not occur. FEC coding and congestion control can be seen as two separate channels. In practice, implementations may mix the signals that are exchanged on these channels. This memo offers a discussion of how FEC coding and congestion control can coexist. Another objective is to encourage the research community also to consider congestion control aspects when proposing and comparing FEC coding solutions in communication systems. This document does not aim at proposing guidelines for characterizing FEC coding solutions. The proposed document considers an end-to-end unicast data transfer with FEC coding at the application (above the transport), within the transport or directly below the transport. The typical application scenario considered in the current version of the document is a client browsing the web or watching a live video. This memo may be extended to cases with multiple paths. This document represents the collaborative work and consensus of the Coding for Efficient Network Communications Research Group (NWCRG); it is not an IETF product and is not a standard. The document follows the terminology proposed in the taxonomy document .

presents the notations that will be used in this document and introduces the Congestion Control (CC) and Forward Erasure Correction (FEC) channels. The Congestion Control channel carries source packets from a sender to a receiver, and packets signaling information about the network (number of packets received vs. lost, ECN marks, etc.) from the receiver to the sender. The Forward Erasure Correction channel carries repair symbols (from the sender to the receiver) and potential information signaling which packets have been repaired (from the receiver to the sender). It is worth pointing out that there are cases where these channels are not separated.

SENDER RECEIVER +------+ +------+ | | source packets ---->| | | CC | | CC | | | network information ---| | +------+ +------+ +------+ +------+ | | repair symbols ---->| | | FEC | | FEC | | | info: repaired symbols --| | +------+ +------+ Inside a host, the CC and FEC entities can be regarded as conceptually separate:

| | | source and/or | packets | repair symbols | v v +---------------+ +-----------------+ | FEC |signaling | CC | | |repaired | |network | |symbols | |information +---------------+==> +-----------------+==> and provide more details than . Some elements are introduced: 'network information' (input control plane for the transport including CC): refers not only to the network information that is explicitly signaled from the receiver, but all the information a congestion control obtains from a network (e.g., TCP can estimate the latency and the available capacity at the bottleneck). 'requirements' (input control plane for the transport including CC): refers to application requirements such as upper/lower rate bounds, periods of quiescence, or a priority. 'sending rate (or window)' (output control plane for the transport including CC): refers to the rate at which a congestion control decides to transmit packets based on 'network information'. 'signaling repaired symbols' (input control plane for the FEC): refers to the information a FEC sender can obtain from a FEC receiver about the performance of the FEC solution as seen by the receiver. 'coding rate' (output control plane for the FEC): refers to the coding rate that is used by the FEC solution. 'source and/or repair symbols' (data plane for both the FEC and the CC): refers to the data that is transmitted. The sender can decide to send source symbols only (meaning that the coding rate is 0), repair symbols only (if the solution decides not to send the original source packets) or a mix of both. The inputs to FEC (incoming data packets without repair symbols, and signaling from the receiver about losses and/or repaired symbols) are distinct from the inputs to CC. The latter calculates a sending rate or window from network information, and it takes the packet to send as input, sometimes along with application requirements such as upper/lower rate bounds, periods of quiescence, or a priority. It is not clear that the ACK signals feeding into a congestion control algorithm are useful to FEC in their raw form, and vice versa - information about repaired blocks may be quite irrelevant to a CC algorithm. The choice of the adequate transport layer may be related to application requirements: In the case of an unreliable data transfer, the transport layer may provide a non-reliable transport service (e.g. UDP or DCCP or a partially reliable transport protocol such as SCTP with partial reliability ). Depending on the amount of redundancy and network conditions, there could be cases where it becomes impossible to carry traffic. In the case of a reliable data transfer, the transport layer may implement a retransmission mechanism to guarantee the reliability of the file transfer (e.g. TCP). Depending on how the FEC and CC functions are scheduled (FEC above CC, FEC in CC, FEC below CC), the impact of reliable transport on the FEC reliability mechanisms is different.

The advantage of this approach is that the FEC overhead does not contribute to congestion in the network. When congestion control is implemented at the transport layer, the repair symbols are sent following the congestion window. This approach can result in improved quality of experience for latency sensitive applications such as VoIP. This approach requires that the transport protocol does not implement a fully reliable data transfer service (e.g., based on lost packet retransmission). UDP is an example of a protocol for which this approach is relevant. For reliable transfers, coding usage does not guarantee better performance and would mainly reduce goodput for large file transfers. This discussion section is extended in .

The advantage of this approach allows a joint optimization between the CC and the FEC. Moreover, the transmission of repair symbols does not add congestion in potentially congested networks but helps repair lost packets (such as tail losses). For reliable transfers, including redundancy reduces goodput for large file transfers but the amount of repair symbols can be adapted, e.g. depending on the congestion window size. There is a trade-off between the cost in capacity used to transmit source packets and the benefits brought out by transmitting repair symbols (e.g. unlocking the receive buffer if this is limiting). The coding ratio needs to be carefully designed. For small files, sending repair symbols when there is no more data to transmit could help to reduce the transfer time. In general, sending repair symbols could avoid a silent period between the transmission of the last packet in the send buffer and 1) firing the retransmission of lost packets, or 2) the transmission of new packets. This discussion section is extended in .

In this case, including redundancy adds congestion without reducing goodput but leads to potential fairness issues. The effective bitrate is indeed higher than the CC's computed fair share due to the sending of repair symbols and the losses are hidden from the transport. This may cause a problem for loss-based congestion detection, but it is not a problem for delay-based congestion detection. The advantage of this approach is that it can result in performance gains when there are persistent transmission losses along the path. The drawback of this approach is that it can induce congestion in already congested networks. The coding ratio needs to be carefully designed. Examples of the solution could be adding a given percentage of the congestion window as supplementary symbols or sending a given amount of repair symbols at a given rate. The redundancy flow can be decorrelated from the congestion control that manages source packets: a separate congestion control entity could be introduced to manage the amount of repaired packets to transmit on the FEC channel. The separate congestion control instances could be made to work together while adhering to priorities, as in coupled congestion control for RTP media in case all traffic can be assumed to take the same path, or otherwise with a multipath congestion window coupling mechanism as in Multipath TCP . Another possibility would be to exploit a lower than best-effort congestion control for repair symbols. This discussion section is extended in .

The objective of this section is to further detail some aspects that have been expressed in previous discussion subsections.

The contract between the client and the operator may guarantee a minimum data-rate (e.g. mobile networks). However, for residential accesses, the data-rate can be guaranteed for the customer premises equipment, but not necessarily for the client. The quality of service that guarantees fairness between the different clients can be seen as a policy concern . While flow level fairness does not embody the actual application level fairness, the share of available capacity between single flows can help assess when one flow starves the other. Clients may share a bottleneck that may not be ruled by a quality of service mechanism, e.g. in case of: a mobile network client running several applications; two clients on a residential access. This document considers fairness as an index to quantify the impact of the addition of coded flows on non-coded flows when they share the same bottleneck. This document does not aim at contributing to the definition of fairness at a wider scale. This document assumes that the non-coded flows respond to congestion signals from the network.

The addition of coding within the flow does not impact on the interaction between coded and non-coded flows. This interaction would mainly depend on the congestion controls embedded in each host.

The addition of coding within the flow may impact the congestion control mechanism and hide congestion losses. Specific interaction between congestion controls and coding schemes can be proposed (see , and ). If no specific interaction is introduced, the coding scheme may hide congestion losses from the congestion controller and the description of may apply.

In this case, the coding scheme may hide congestion losses from the congestion controller. There are cases where this can drastically reduce the goodput of non-coded flows. Depending on the congestion control, it may be possible to signal to the congestion control mechanism that there was congestion (loss) even when a packet has been recovered, e.g. using ECN, to reduce the impact on the non-coded flows (see and ).

The objective of this subsection is to describe potential interactions between the congestion control and the recovered symbols.

The congestion control may not be able to differentiate repair symbols from actual source packets. The relevance of adding coding at the application layer is related to the needs of the application. For real-time applications, this approach may reduce the number of retransmission. The usage of a non-reliable transport is more adequate in this case.

If the two FEC and CC channels are decoupled, the endpoint may exploit different protocols for each channel. The channels may be coupled and one single protocol may be exploited. In both cases, the receiver can differentiate source packets and repair symbols. The receiver may indicate both the number of source packets received and repair symbols that were actually useful in the recovery process of packets.

The congestion control may not know what is going on in the network underneath and whether a coding scheme is introduced or not. The congestion control may behave as if no coding scheme is introduced. The only way for a coding channel to indicate that symbols have been recovered is to exploit existing signaling that is understood by the congestion control mechanism. An example would be to indicate to a TCP sender that a packet has been recovered (i.e., congestion has occurred), by using ECN signaling .

This section discusses to what extent the interaction between the congestion control and the coding rates is possible.

The coding rate applied at the application layer mainly depends on the available capacity given by the congestion control underneath. Adapting the coding rate to the minimum required data rate of the application may reduce packet losses and improve the quality of experience.

In this case, there is an important flexibility in the trade-off, inherent to the use of coding, between (1) reducing goodput when useless repair symbols are transmitted and (2) helping to recover sooner from transmission and congestion losses. As explained in , the receiver may indicate to the sender the number of packets that have been received or recovered. The sender may exploit this information to tune the coding ratio. As one example of flexibility of this case, coupling an increased transmission rate with an increasing or decreasing coding rate could be envisioned. A server may use an increasing coding rate as a probe of the channel capacity and adapt the congestion control transmission rate.

In this case, the coding rate can be tuned depending on the number of recovered symbols and the rate at which the sender transmits data. The coding scheme is not aware of the congestion control implementation, making it hard for the coding scheme to apply the relevant coding rate.

There are cases where useless repair symbols may be transmitted. These impact on the network load and may reduce the goodput of the flow without concrete gains.

In this case, the discussion depends on application needs. The only case where adding useless repair symbols does not result in reduced goodput is when the application needs a limited amount of goodput (e.g., VoIP traffic). In this case, the useless repair symbols would only impact the amount of data generated in the network.

The sender may exploit the information given by the receiver to reduce the number of useless repair symbols and the resulting goodput reduction.

In this case, the useless repair symbols only impact the load of the network without actual gain for the coded flow.

This section provides a simplified state-of-the art of the activities related to congestion control and coding. The objective is to identify open research questions and contribute to advice when evaluating coding mechanisms.

We map activities related to congestion control and coding with the organization presented in this document: For the FEC above transport case: TBD For the FEC within transport case: , , . For the FEC below transport case: , .

The research questions should be mapped following the organization of this document. In all these three use-cases, open questions remain. There is a general trade-off, inherent to the use of coding, between (1) reducing goodput when useless repair symbols are transmitted and (2) helping to recover from transmission and congestion losses. For the FEC above transport case, there is a trade-off related to the amount of redundancy to add, as a function of the transport layer protocol and application requirements. For the FEC within transport case, recovering lost symbols may hide congestion losses to the congestion control. Some existing solutions already propose to disambiguate acked packets from rebuilt packets . New signalling methods and FEC-recovery-aware congestion controls could be proposed. For the FEC below transport case, there are opportunities for introducing interaction between congestion control and coding schemes to improve the quality of experience while guaranteeing fairness with other flows. An open question also resides in the relevance of FEC when there are multiple streams that exploit the FEC channel.

The contribution to research questions should be mapped following the organization of this document. Otherwise, this may lead to wrong assumptions on the validity of the proposal and wrong ideas about the relevance of coding for a given use case. The discussion provided in this document aims at encouraging the research community to also consider congestion control aspects when proposing and comparing FEC coding solutions in communication systems. As one example, this draft proposes discussions on the impact of the proposed FEC solution on congestion control, especially loss-based congestion control mechanisms. When a research work aims at improving the throughput by hiding the packet loss signal from the congestion control, the authors should 1) discuss the advantages of using the proposed FEC solution compared to replacing the congestion control by one that ignores a portion of the encountered losses, 2) critically discuss the impact of hiding packet loss from the congestion control mechanism.

Many thanks to Spencer Dawkins, Dave Oran, Carsten Bormann, Vincent Roca and Marie-Jose Montpetit for their useful comments that helped improve the document.

This memo includes no request to IANA.

FEC and CC schemes can contribute to DoS attacks. This is not specific to this document. In case of FEC below the transport, the aggregate rate of source and repair packets may exceed the rate at which a congestion control mechanism allows an application to send. This could result in an application obtaining more than its fair share of the network capacity.