PWE3 S. Bryant, Ed. Internet-Draft C. Filsfils Intended status: Standards Track Cisco Systems Expires: April 27, 2010 U. Drafz Deutsche Telekom V. Kompella J. Regan Alcatel-Lucent S. Amante Level 3 Communications October 24, 2009 Flow Aware Transport of Pseudowires over an MPLS PSN draft-ietf-pwe3-fat-pw-02 Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on April 27, 2010. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2009 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents in effect on the date of publication of this document (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info). Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 1] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 and restrictions with respect to this document. Abstract Where the payload carried over a pseudowire carries a number of identifiable flows it can in some circumstances be desirable to carry those flows over the equal cost multiple paths (ECMPs) that exist in the packet switched network. Most forwarding engines are able to hash based on label stacks and use this to balance flows over ECMPs. This draft describes a method of identifying the flows, or flow groups, to the label switched routers by including an additional label in the label stack. Requirements Language The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119 [RFC2119]. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 2] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.1. ECMP in Label Switched Routers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2. Flow Label . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2. Native Service Processing Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3. Pseudowire Forwarder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.1. Encapsulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4. Signaling the Presence of the Flow Label . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4.1. Structure of Flow Label Sub-TLV . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5. Multi-Segment Pseudowires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6. OAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 7. Applicability of FAT PWs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 7.1. Equal Cost Multiple Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7.2. Link Aggregation Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 7.3. The Single Large Flow Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 7.4. MPLS-TP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 8. Applicability to MPLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 11. Congestion Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 12. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 13. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 13.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 13.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 3] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 1. Introduction A pseudowire (PW) [RFC3985] is normally transported over one single network path, even if multiple Equal Cost Multiple Paths (ECMP) exit between the ingress and egress PW provider edge (PE) equipments[RFC4385] [RFC4928]. This is required to preserve the characteristics of the emulated service (e.g. to avoid misordering SAToP pseudowire packets [RFC4553] or subjecting the packets to unusable inter-arrival times ). The use of a single path to preserve order remains the default mode of operation of a pseudowire (PW). The new capability proposed in this document is an OPTIONAL mode which may be used when the use of ECMP paths for is known to be beneficial (and not harmful) to the operation of the PW. Some pseudowires are used to transport large volumes of IP traffic between routers at two locations. One example of this is the use of an Ethernet pseudowire to create a virtual direct link between a pair of routers. Such pseudowire's may carry from hundred's of Mbps to Gbps of traffic. Such pseudowire's do not require strict ordering to be preserved between packets of the pseudowire. They only require ordering to be preserved within the context of each individual transported IP flow. Some operators have requested the ability to explicitly configure such a pseudowire to leverage the availability of multiple ECMP paths. This allows for better capacity planning as the statistical multiplexing of a larger number of smaller flows is more efficient than with a smaller set of larger flows. Although Ethernet is used as an example above, the mechanisms described in this draft are general mechanisms that may be applied to any pseudowire type in which there are identifiable flows, and in which there is no requirement to preserve the order between those flows. Typically, forwarding hardware can deduce that an IP payload is being directly carried by an MPLS label stack, and is capable of looking at some fields in packets to construct hash buckets for conversations or flows. However, an intermediate node has no information on the type pseudowire being carried in the packet. This limits the forwarder at the intermediate node to only being able to make an ECMP choice based on a hash of the label stack. In the case of a pseudowire emulating a high bandwidth trunk, the granularity obtained by hashing the default label stack is inadequate for satisfactory load-balancing. The ingress node, however, is in the special position of being able to look at the un-encapsulated packet and spread flows amongst any available ECMP paths, or even any Loop-Free Alternates [RFC5286] . This draft proposes a method to introduce granularity on the hashing of traffic running over pseudowires by introducing an additional label, chosen by the ingress node, and placed at the bottom of the label stack. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 4] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 In addition to providing an indication of the flow structure for use in ECMP forwarding decisions, the mechanism described in the document may also be used to select flows for distribution over an 802.1ad link aggregation group that has been used in an MPLS network. 1.1. ECMP in Label Switched Routers Label switched routers commonly hash the label stack or some elements of the label stack as a method of discriminating between flows, in order to distribute those flows over the available equal cost multiple paths that exist in the network. Since the label at the bottom of stack is usually the label most closely associated with the flow, this normally provides the greatest entropy, and hence is usually included in the hash. This draft describes a method of adding an additional label at the bottom of stack in order to facilitate the load balancing of the flows within a pseudowire over the available ECMPs. A similar design for general MPLS use has also been proposed [I-D.kompella-mpls-entropy-label], however that is outside the scope of this draft. An alternative method of load balancing by creating a number of pseudowires and distributing the flows amongst them was considered, but was rejected because: o It did not introduce as much entropy as the load balance label method. o It required additional pseudowires to be set up and maintained. 1.2. Flow Label An additional label is interposed between the pseudowire label and the control word, or if the control word is not present, between the pseudowire label and the pseudowire payload. This additional label is called the flow label. Indivisible flows within the pseudowire MUST be mapped to the same flow label by the ingress PE. The flow label stimulates the correct ECMP load balancing behaviour in the packet switched network (PSN). On receipt of the pseudowire packet at the egress PE (which knows this additional label is present) the flow label is discarded without processing. Note that the flow label MUST NOT be an MPLS reserved label (values in the range 0..15) [RFC3032], but is otherwise unconstrained by the protocol. Considerations of the TTL value are described in the Security section of this document. The flow label can never become the top label in normal operation, and hence the TTL in the flow label is never used Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 5] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 to determine whether the packet should be discarded due to TTL expiry. Therefore there are no lower restrictions on the TTL value. 2. Native Service Processing Function The Native Service Processing (NSP) function [RFC3985] is a component of a PE that has knowledge of the structure of the emulated service and is able to take action on the service outside the scope of the pseudowire. In this case it is required that the NSP in the ingress PE identify flows, or groups of flows within the service, and indicate the flow (group) identity of each packet as it is passed to the pseudowire forwarder. As an example, where the PW type is an Ethernet, the NSP might parse the ingress Ethernet traffic and consider all of the IP traffic. This traffic could then be categorised into flows by considering all traffic with the same source and destination address pair to be a single indivisible flow. Since this is an NSP function, by definition, the method used to identify a flow is outside the scope of the pseudowire design. Similarly, since the NSP is internal to the PE, the method of flow indication to the pseudowire forwarder is outside the scope of this document. 3. Pseudowire Forwarder The pseudowire forwarder must be provided with a method of mapping flows to load balanced paths. The forwarder must generate a label for the flow or group of flows. How the load balance label values are determined is outside the scope of this document, however the load balance label allocated to a flow MUST NOT be an MPLS reserved label and SHOULD remain constant for the life of the flow. It is recommended that the method chosen to generate the load balancing labels introduces a high degree of entropy in their values, to maximise the entropy presented to the ECMP path selection mechanism in the LSRs in the PSN, and hence distribute the flows as evenly as possible over the available PSN ECMP paths. The forwarder at the ingress PE prepends the pseudowire control word (if applicable), and then pushes the flow label, followed by the pseudowire label. The forwarder at the egress PE uses the pseudowire label to identify the pseudowire. From the context associated with the pseudowire label, the egress PE can determine whether a flow label is present. If a flow label is present, the label is discarded. All other pseudowire forwarding operations are unmodified by the Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 6] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 inclusion of the flow label. 3.1. Encapsulation The PWE3 Protocol Stack Reference Model modified to include flow label is shown in Figure 1 below +-------------+ +-------------+ | Emulated | | Emulated | | Ethernet | | Ethernet | | (including | Emulated Service | (including | | VLAN) |<==============================>| VLAN) | | Services | | Services | +-------------+ +-------------+ | Flow | | Flow | +-------------+ Pseudowire +-------------+ |Demultiplexer|<==============================>|Demultiplexer| +-------------+ +-------------+ | PSN | PSN Tunnel | PSN | | MPLS |<==============================>| MPLS | +-------------+ +-------------+ | Physical | | Physical | +-----+-------+ +-----+-------+ Figure 1: PWE3 Protocol Stack Reference Model The encapsulation of a pseudowire with a flow label is shown in Figure 2 below Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 7] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 +-------------------------------+ | | | Payload | | | n octets | | +-------------------------------+ | Optional Control Word | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | Flow label | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | PW label | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | MPLS Tunnel label(s) | n*4 octets (four octets per label) +-------------------------------+ Figure 2: Encapsulation of a pseudowire with a pseudowire load balancing label 4. Signaling the Presence of the Flow Label When using the signalling procedures in [RFC4447], a Pseudowire Interface Parameter Sub-TLV type is used to synchronise the flow label states between the ingress and egress PEs. A PE that wishes to use a flow label includes in its label mapping message a Flow Label Sub-TLV (FL Sub-TLV) with F = 1 (see Section 4.1). A PE that can correctly process a flow label, and is willing to receive one, but does not wish to send a flow label, includes an FL Sub-TLV with F = 0. If a PE has sent an FL Sub-TLV with F = 1, and has received an FL Sub-TLV it MUST include a flow lablel in the label stack. If a PE has sent an FL Sub-TLV with F = 1 and does not receive an FL Sub-TLV it MUST send a new label mapping using an FL Sub-TLV with F = 0. A PE that has sent an FL Sub-TLV with F = 0 MUST NOT include a flow lablel in the label stack. If a PE that previously did not received a label binding without a FL Sub-TLV receives a new a label mapping with one included, it MAY send a new label mapping including an FL Sub-TLV with F = 1. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 8] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 The signalling procedures in [RFC4447] state that "Processing of the interface parameters should continue when unknown interface parameters are encountered, and they MUST be silently ignored." The signalling proceedure described here is therefore backwards compatible with existing implementations. If PWE3 signalling [RFC4447] is not in use for a pseudowire, then whether the flow label is used MUST be identically provisioned in both PEs at the pseudowire endpoints. If there is no provisioning support for this option, the default behaviour is not to include the flow label. Note that what is signalled is the desire to include the flow label in the label stack. The value of the label is a local matter for the ingress PE, and the label value itself is not signalled. 4.1. Structure of Flow Label Sub-TLV The structure of the flow label TLV is shown in Figure 3. 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | FL | Length |F| must be zero | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Figure 3: Flow Label Sub-TLV Where: o FL is the flow label sub-TLV identifier assigned by IANA. o Length is the length of the TLV in octets and is 4. o When F=1 a flow label will be pushed. When F=0 a flow label will not be pushed. 5. Multi-Segment Pseudowires The flow label mechanism described in this document works on multi- segment PWs without requiring modification to the Switching PEs (S-PEs). This is because the flow label is transparent to the label swap operation, and because interface parameter Sub-TLV signalling is transitive. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 9] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 6. OAM The following OAM considerations apply to this method of load balancing. Where the OAM is only to be used to perform a basic test that the pseudowires have been configured at the PEs, VCCV [RFC5085] messages may be sent using any load balance pseudowire path, i.e. using any value for the flow label. Where it is required to verify that a pseudowire is fully functional for all flows, VCCV [RFC5085] connection verification message MUST be sent over each ECMP path to the pseudowire egress PE. This problem is difficult to solve and scales poorly. We believe that this problem is addressed by the following two methods: 1. If a failure occurs within the PSN, this failure will normally be detected by the PSN's Interior Gateway protocol (IGP) link/node failure detection mechanism (loss of light, bidirectional forwarding detection [I-D.ietf-bfd-base] or IGP hello detection), and the IGP convergence will naturally modify the ECMP set of network paths between the Ingress and Egress PE's. Hence the PW is only impacted during the normal IGP convergence time. 2. If the failure is related to the individual corruption of an Label Forwarding Information dataBase (LFIB) entry in a router, then only the network path using that specific entry is impacted. If the PW is load balanced over multiple network paths, then this failure can only be detected if, by chance, the transported OAM flow is mapped onto the impacted network path, or all paths are tested. This type of error may be better solved be solved by other means such as LSP self test [I-D.ietf-mpls-lsr-self-test]. To troubleshoot the MPLS PSN, including multiple paths, the techniques described in [RFC4378] and [RFC4379] can be used. Where the pseudowire OAM is carried out of band (VCCV Type 2) [RFC5085] it is necessary to insert an "MPLS Router Alert Label" in the label stack. The resultant label stack is a follows: Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 10] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 +-------------------------------+ | | | Payload | | | n octets | | +-------------------------------+ | Optional Control Word | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | Flow label | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | PW label | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | Router Alert label | 4 octets +-------------------------------+ | MPLS Tunnel label(s) | n*4 octets (four octets per label) +-------------------------------+ Figure 4: Use of Router Alert LAbel 7. Applicability of FAT PWs A node within the PSN is not able to perform deep-packet-inspection (DPI) of the PW as the PW technology is not self-describing: the structure of the PW payload is only known to the ingress and egress PE devices. The method proposed in this document provides a statistical mitigation of the problem of load balance in those cased where a PE is able to discern flows embedded in the traffic received on the attachment circuit. The methods describe in this document are transparent to the PSN and as such do not require any new capability from the PSN. The requirement to load-balance over multiple PSN paths occurs when the ratio between the PW access speed and the PSN's core link bandwidth is large (e.g. >= 10%). ATM and FR are unlikely to meet this property. Ethernet may have this property, and for that reason this document focuses on Ethernet. Applications for other high- access-bandwidth PW's (e.g. Fibre Channel) may be defined in the future. This design applies to MPLS pseudowires where it is meaningful to de- construct the packets presented to the ingress PE into flows. The mechanism described in this document promotes the distribution of flows within the pseudowire over different network paths. This in turn means that whilst packets within a flow are delivered in order (subject to normal IP delivery perturbations due to topology Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 11] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 variation), order is not maintained amongst packets of different flows. It is not proposed to associate a different sequence number with each flow. If sequence number support is required this mechanism is not applicable. Where it is known that the traffic carried by the Ethernet pseudowire is IP the method of identifying the flows are well known and can be applied. Such methods typically include hashing on the source and destination addresses, the protocol ID and higher-layer flow- dependent fields such as TCP/UDP ports, L2TPv3 Session ID's etc. Where it is known that the traffic carried by the Ethernet pseudowire is non-IP, techniques used for link bundling between Ethernet switches may be reused. In this case however the latency distribution would be larger than is found in the link bundle case. The acceptability of the increased latency is for further study. Of particular importance the Ethernet control frames SHOULD always be mapped to the same PSN path to ensure in-order delivery. 7.1. Equal Cost Multiple Paths ECMP in packet switched networks is statistical in nature. The mapping of flows to a particular path does not take into account the bandwidth of the flow being mapped or the current bandwidth usage of the members of the ECMP set. This simplification works well when the distribution of flows is evenly spread over the ECMP set and there are a large number of flows that have low bandwidth relative to the paths. The random allocation of a flow to a path provides a good approximation to an even spread of flows, provided that polarisation effects are avoided. The method proposed in this document has the same statistical properties as an IP PSN. ECMP is a load-sharing mechanism that is based on sharing the load over a number of layer 3 paths through the PSN. Often however multiple links exist between a pair of LSRs that are considered by the IGP to be a single link. These are known as link bundles. The mechanism described in this document can also be used to distribute the flows within a pseudowire over the members of the link bundle by using the flow label value to identify candidate flows. How that mapping takes place is outside the scope of this specification. Similar considerations apply to link aggregation groups. In the ECMP case and the link bundling case the NSP may attempt to take bandwidth into consideration when allocating groups of flows to a common path. That is permitted, but it must be borne in mind that the semantics of a label stack entry (LSE) as defined by [RFC3032] cannot be modified, the value of the flow label cannot be modified at any point on the LSP, and the interpretation of bit patterns in, or Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 12] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 values of, the flow label by an LSR are undefined. A different type of load balancing is the desire to carry a pseudowire over a set of PSN links in which the bandwidth of members of the link set is less than the bandwidth of the pseudowire. This problem is addressed in [I-D.stein-pwe3-pwbonding]. Such a mechanism can be considered complementary to this mechanism. 7.2. Link Aggregation Groups A Link Aggregation Group (LAG) is used to bond together several physical circuits between two adjacent nodes so they appear to higher-layer protocols as a single, higher bandwidth "virtual" pipe. These may co-exist in various parts of a given network. An advantage of LAGs is that they reduce the number of routing and signalling protocol adjacencies between devices, reducing control plane processing overhead. As with ECMP, the key problem related to LAGs is that due to inefficiencies in LAG load-distribution algorithms, a particular component of a LAG may experience congestion. The mechanism proposed here may be able to assist in producing a more uniform flow distribution. The same considerations requiring a flow to go over a single member of an ECMP path set apply to a member of a LAG. 7.3. The Single Large Flow Case Clearly the operator should make sure that the service offered using PW technology and the method described in this document does not exceed the maximum planned link capacity, unless it can be guaranteed that it conforms to the Internet traffic profile of a very large number of small flows. If the payload on a PW is made of a single inner flow (i.e. an encrypted connection between two routers), or the flow identifiers are too deeply buried in the packet, then the functionality described in this document does not give any benefits, though neither does it cause harm relative to the existing situation. The most common case where a single flow dominated the traffic on a PW is when it is used to transport enterprise traffic. Enterprise traffic may well consist of a large single TCP flows, or encrypted flows that cannot be handled by the methods described in this document. An operator has six options under these circumstances: 1. The operator can do nothing and the system will work as it does without the flow label. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 13] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 2. The operator can make the customer aware that the service offering has a restriction on flow bandwidth and police flows to that restriction. This would allow customers offering multiple flows to use a larger fraction their access bandwidth, whilst preventing an single flow from consuming a fraction of internal link bandwidth that the operator considered excessive. 3. The operator could configure the ingress PE to assign a constant flow label to all high bandwidth flows so that only one path was affected by these flows, 4. The operator could configure the ingress PE to assign a random flow label to all high bandwidth flows so as to minimise the disruption to the network as a cost of out of order traffic to the user. 5. The operator could configure the ingress to assign a label of special significance (such as a reserved label) to all high bandwidth flows so that some other action (not specified in this document) could be taken on the flow. The issues described above are mitigated by the following two factors: o Firstly, the customer of a high-bandwidth PW service has an incentive to get the best transport service because an inefficient use of the PSN leads to jitter and eventually to loss to the PW's payload. o Secondly, the customer is usually able to tailor their applications to generate many flows in the PSN. A well-known example is massive data transport between servers which use many parallel TCP sessions. This same technique can be used by any transport protocol: multiple UDP ports, multiple L2TPv3 Session ID's, multiple GRE keys may be used to decompose a large flow into smaller components. This approach may be applied to IPsec [RFC4301] where multiple Security Parameters Indexes (SPI's) may be allocated to the same security association. 7.4. MPLS-TP The MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) [I-D.ietf-mpls-tp-requirements] requirement 44 states that "MPLS-TP SHOULD support mechanisms to enable the reserved bandwidth of a transport path to be decreased without impacting the existing traffic on that transport path, provided that the level of existing traffic is smaller than the reserved bandwidth following the decrease." The flow aware transport of a PW reorders packets (albeit in an application friendly way), Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 14] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 therefore SHOULD NOT be deployed in a network conforming to the MPLS-TP. 8. Applicability to MPLS A further application of this technique would be to create a basis for hash diversity without having to peek below the label stack for IP traffic carried over LDP LSPs. Work on the generalisation of this to MPLS has been described in [I-D.kompella-mpls-entropy-label]. This is can be regarded as a complementary, but distinct, approach since although similar consideration may apply to the identification of flows and the allocation of flow label values, the flow labels are imposed by different network components, and the associated signalling mechanisms are different. 9. Security Considerations The pseudowire generic security considerations described in [RFC3985] and the security considerations applicable to a specific pseudowire type (for example, in the case of an Ethernet pseudowire [RFC4448] apply. The ingress PE SHOULD take steps to ensure that the load-balance label is not used as a covert channel. It is useful to give consideration to the choice of TTL value in the flow label stack entry [RFC3032]. The flow label is at the bottom of label stack. Therefore, even when penultimate hop popping is employed, it will always be will preceded by the PW label on arrival at the PE. The flow label TTL should therefore never be considered by the forwarder, and hence SHOULD be set to a value of 1. This will prevent the packet being inadvertently forwarded based on the value of the flow label. Note that this may be a departure from considerations that apply to the general MPLS case. 10. IANA Considerations IANA is requested to allocate the next available values from the IETF Consensus range in the Pseudowire Interface Parameters Sub-TLV type Registry as a Flow Label indicator. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 15] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 Parameter Length Description ID TBD 4 Flow Label 11. Congestion Considerations The congestion considerations applicable to pseudowires as described in [RFC3985] and any additional congestion considerations developed at the time of publication apply to this design. The ability to explicitly configure a PW to leverage the availability of multiple ECMP paths is beneficial to capacity planning as, all other parameters being constant, the statistical multiplexing of a larger number of smaller flows is more efficient than with a smaller number of larger flows. Note that if the classification into flows is only performed on IP packets the behaviour of those flows in the face of congestion will be as already defined by the IETF for packets of that type and no additional congestion processing is required. Where flows that are not IP are classified pseudowire congestion avoidance must be applied to each non-IP load balance group. 12. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Eric Grey, Kireeti Kompella, Joerg Kuechemann, Wilfried Maas, Luca Martini, Mark Townsley, and Lucy Yong for valuable comments on this document. 13. References 13.1. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [RFC3032] Rosen, E., Tappan, D., Fedorkow, G., Rekhter, Y., Farinacci, D., Li, T., and A. Conta, "MPLS Label Stack Encoding", RFC 3032, January 2001. [RFC4379] Kompella, K. and G. Swallow, "Detecting Multi-Protocol Label Switched (MPLS) Data Plane Failures", RFC 4379, February 2006. Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 16] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 [RFC4385] Bryant, S., Swallow, G., Martini, L., and D. McPherson, "Pseudowire Emulation Edge-to-Edge (PWE3) Control Word for Use over an MPLS PSN", RFC 4385, February 2006. [RFC4447] Martini, L., Rosen, E., El-Aawar, N., Smith, T., and G. Heron, "Pseudowire Setup and Maintenance Using the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP)", RFC 4447, April 2006. [RFC4448] Martini, L., Rosen, E., El-Aawar, N., and G. Heron, "Encapsulation Methods for Transport of Ethernet over MPLS Networks", RFC 4448, April 2006. [RFC4553] Vainshtein, A. and YJ. Stein, "Structure-Agnostic Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) over Packet (SAToP)", RFC 4553, June 2006. [RFC4928] Swallow, G., Bryant, S., and L. Andersson, "Avoiding Equal Cost Multipath Treatment in MPLS Networks", BCP 128, RFC 4928, June 2007. [RFC5085] Nadeau, T. and C. Pignataro, "Pseudowire Virtual Circuit Connectivity Verification (VCCV): A Control Channel for Pseudowires", RFC 5085, December 2007. 13.2. Informative References [I-D.ietf-bfd-base] Katz, D. and D. Ward, "Bidirectional Forwarding Detection", draft-ietf-bfd-base-09 (work in progress), February 2009. [I-D.ietf-mpls-lsr-self-test] Swallow, G., "Label Switching Router Self-Test", draft-ietf-mpls-lsr-self-test-07 (work in progress), May 2007. [I-D.ietf-mpls-tp-requirements] Niven-Jenkins, B., Brungard, D., Betts, M., Sprecher, N., and S. Ueno, "MPLS-TP Requirements", draft-ietf-mpls-tp-requirements-10 (work in progress), August 2009. [I-D.kompella-mpls-entropy-label] Kompella, K. and S. Amante, "The Use of Entropy Labels in MPLS Forwarding", draft-kompella-mpls-entropy-label-00 (work in progress), July 2008. [I-D.stein-pwe3-pwbonding] Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 17] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 Stein, Y., Mendelsohn, I., and R. Insler, "PW Bonding", draft-stein-pwe3-pwbonding-01 (work in progress), November 2008. [RFC3985] Bryant, S. and P. Pate, "Pseudo Wire Emulation Edge-to- Edge (PWE3) Architecture", RFC 3985, March 2005. [RFC4301] Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005. [RFC4378] Allan, D. and T. Nadeau, "A Framework for Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Operations and Management (OAM)", RFC 4378, February 2006. [RFC5286] Atlas, A. and A. Zinin, "Basic Specification for IP Fast Reroute: Loop-Free Alternates", RFC 5286, September 2008. Authors' Addresses Stewart Bryant (editor) Cisco Systems 250 Longwater Ave Reading RG2 6GB United Kingdom Phone: +44-208-824-8828 Email: stbryant@cisco.com Clarence Filsfils Cisco Systems Brussels Belgium Email: cfilsfil@cisco.com Ulrich Drafz Deutsche Telekom Muenster Germany Email: Ulrich.Drafz@t-com.net Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 18] Internet-Draft FAT-PW October 2009 Vach Kompella Alcatel-Lucent Email: Alcatel-Lucent vach.kompella@alcatel-lucent.com Joe Regan Alcatel-Lucent Email: joe.regan@alcatel-lucent.comRegan Shane Amante Level 3 Communications Email: shane@castlepoint.net Bryant, et al. Expires April 27, 2010 [Page 19]