CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Ken Schroder/BBN CIP Minutes Agenda Status Reports o ST-II o COIP-K o FP o MCHIP Collaboration Plans o Research, experiments Meeting Report The Connection Oriented Internetwork Protocol Working Group (CIP) is developing a set of protocols and resource management algorithms to support guaranteed service, packet switched communication in an internet. Applications in the areas of wide area video conferencing and distributed simulation would both benefit from service guarantees. Elements of this support include resource reservation, flow regulation, instrumentation and enforcement mechanisms to ensure acceptable bandwidth, end-to-end delay and delay variation. Approaches for allowing reservations to be renegotiated as the workload changes are also anticipated. Claudio Topolcic, Working Group Chair, opened the meeting. The goal of this meeting was to review what had been accomplished since the Vancouver meeting and to plan what will be done during the next three months. We were particularly interested in understanding how the work each group member was doing might compliment one other. RFC-1190 ``Experimental Internet Stream Protocol, Version 2 (ST-II)'' has been released. ST-II is an IP-layer protocol that provides 1 end-to-end service guarantees across an internet. It was designed through earlier efforts of the Working Group to replace the Internet Stream Protocol originally defined in IEN-119. ST-II implementation status was presented by Ken Schroder. Portions of the control protocol are currently operating at BBN on an Ethernet. They expect to: o Pass data application to application over Ethernet by the end of December. o Integrate T1 support by end of January. The protocol implementation is expected to be operating in the DARPA sponsored DARTNET in February. Support will include connection setup and tear down, hop identifier negotiation, and add/delete targets. ST-II will then be used as a protocol testbed for exploring instrumentation and algorithms that: o Ensure proper priority traffic handling to ensure that time guarantees are met. o Provide predictable estimates of delay and delay variance. o Guarantee that network switching elements meet end-to-end performance promised to applications. o Enforce that application traffic cannot exceed the resources level it originally requested. The issuing of RFC-1190 signaled the end, at least for now, of the ST track that this Working Group was following. The Working Group will continue to study connection oriented protocols. FP Flow Protocol work was presented by Lixia Zhang. They are using IP option fields to implement the flow protocol. This approach has simplified the work required and allows the protocol to coexist with IP, since standard gateways will forward the packets. Developing a customized protocol would not have offered those benefits. The current implementation goals include support for: o Lixia's Flow Protocol o Fair queuing algorithms o Timestamp ordered driver queues to support priority scheduling 2 They have plans to experiment with dynamic rate adjustment, including selectively throttling traffic sources (rather than all sources) to handle congestion control. They hope to make TCP use FP in the future. They cited several difficulties they encountered with the current approach. o Clock granularity is too coarse for traffic generator applications programs to use for generating packets at specific rates o Table lookup inefficient: hard to get small universal identifiers o Fair Queuing for IP is implemented on a per TCP connection basis. The current implementation uses source and destination host IP addresses plus port numbers as the connection identifier. Performance measurement was discussed. They timestamp packets at source, destination and all intermediate routers. Since transmission and propagation delays are known, queuing delay can be calculated. Potential future work includes: o Virtual clock testing. The virtual clock was implemented but not tested because queues don't build up on Sparcs with Ethernet. (Ethernet is much faster.) o FP providing reliability by selective retransmission o Host pacing FP/ST sharing was discussed. It was felt that some of the enforcement mechanism supported by the virtual clock Lixia's flow protocol could be integrated into the ST-II network layer. This would require integration of the timestamp ordering mechanisms and supplying various flow parameters. The potential for more extensive integration will be discussed after the ST-II implementation is working. Resource management work at Berkeley was presented by Hui Zhang. Their work includes explicit delay and jitter control. Packets are marked with the desired transmission time and buffered until the deadline arrives. This works to limit jitter. Studies they have performed suggests this will also reduce the buffer space requirements of the overall network. Connection Oriented IP Kernel was presented by Guru Parulkar. The COIP-K is meant to provide a core set of functions--application and network interface, data forwarding and state machine 3 management--expected to be needed by high performance protocols such as ST-II. Their goal is to provide a reusable foundation in which resource management protocol research can be performed more easily. o Chuck Cranor will return to work on software shortly o They expect to have it debugged in January o Can implement resource enforcement, potentially by incorporating Lixia's virtual clock code There was some discussion about the availability and suitability of COIP-K to the ST-II and FP efforts. We plan to revisit this in January after initial implementation is available. MCHIP was presented by Guru Parulkar. This is a connection oriented resource management protocol that Guru has been working on. There are three basic elements: 1. Resource requirements characterized by peak rate, average rate and burstiness. 2. Perpetual Congrams (PiCons) are routed using reservations and virtual circuits, e.g., through ATM networks. 3. Server can provide resource allocations for unmanaged datagram networks, e.g., Ethernet. (There was some dispute as to whether this was doable in the general case, whether source routing would provide an adequate solution, and how much constraints would have to be relaxed for it to work.) The meeting concluded after discussions of what next steps to take. The potential combining of COIP-K, ST-II, and FP into a single COIP will be explored in January. Many elements of FP resource management and enforcement seem complimentary and compatible with the ST-II implementation, which provides connection setup and management facilities. The COIP-K is intended to be compatible with these and other protocols. We plan to meeting, ideally by video conference, in late January to discuss how more of our work can be integrated. At that point, working versions of COIP-K and ST-II should both be available. Attendees Ashok Agrawala agrawala@cs.umd.edu Robert Braden braden@isi.edu 4 Kevin Fall kfall@ucsd.edu Gurudatta Parulkar guru@flora.wustl.edu Ken Schroder schroder@bbn.com Claudio Topolcic topolcic@bbn.com Hui Zhang hzhang@tenet.berkeley.edu Lixia Zhang lixia@parc.xerox.com 5