skip to main content
10.1145/3673422.3674896acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescommConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

To switch or not to switch to TCP Prague? Incentives for adoption in a partial L4S deployment

Published: 20 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S) architecture has the potential to reduce queuing delay when it is deployed at endpoints and routers throughout the Internet. However, it is not clear how TCP Prague, a prototype scalable congestion control for L4S, behaves when L4S is not yet universally deployed. Specifically, we consider the question: in a partial L4S deployment, will a user benefit by unilaterally switching from the status quo TCP to TCP Prague? To address this question, we evaluate the performance of a TCP Prague flow when sharing an L4S or non-L4S bottleneck queue with a non-L4S flow. Our findings suggest that the L4S congestion control, TCP Prague, has less favorable throughput or fairness properties than TCP Cubic or BBR in some coexistence scenarios, which may hinder adoption.

References

[1]
B. Briscoe, K. De Schepper, O. Tilmans, M. Kühlewind, J. Misund, O. Albisser, and A. S. Ahmed, "Implementing the 'Prague Requirements' for Low Latency Low Loss Scalable Throughput (L4S)," Netdev 0x13, 2019.
[2]
F. F. Fatih Berkay Sarpkaya, "Reproducing "Scalable Congestion Control Resolves the Delay Utilization Dilemma"," https://github.com/fatihsarpkaya/TCP-ECN, 2024.
[3]
B. Briscoe, K. D. Schepper, M. Bagnulo, and G. White, "Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) Internet Service: Architecture," RFC 9330, Jan. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9330
[4]
K. D. Schepper, O. Tilmans, B. Briscoe, and V. Goel, "Prague Congestion Control," Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet-Draft draft-briscoe-iccrg-prague-congestion-control-03, Oct. 2023, work in Progress. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-briscoe-iccrg-prague-congestion-control/03/
[5]
B. Briscoe, M. Kühlewind, and R. Scheffenegger, "More Accurate Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Feedback in TCP," Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet-Draft draft-ietf-tcpm-accurate-ecn-28, Nov. 2023, work in Progress. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tcpm-accurate-ecn/28/
[6]
M. Kühlewind, R. Scheffenegger, and B. Briscoe, "Problem Statement and Requirements for Increased Accuracy in Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Feedback," RFC 7560, Aug. 2015. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7560
[7]
O. Albisser, K. De Schepper, B. Briscoe, O. Tilmans, and H. Steen, "DUALPI2---Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable (L4S) AQM," NetDev 0x13, Prague, 2019.
[8]
K. D. Schepper, O. Albisser, O. Tilmans, and B. Briscoe, "Dual Queue Coupled AQM: Deployable Very Low Queuing Delay for All," 2022.
[9]
K. D. Schepper, B. Briscoe, and G. White, "Dual-Queue Coupled Active Queue Management (AQM) for Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S)," RFC 9332, Jan. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9332
[10]
N. Economides, "The Economics of Networks," Intl. Journal of Industrial Organization, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 673--699, 1996.
[11]
I. Baldin, A. Nikolich, J. Griffioen, I.I. S. Monga, K.-C. Wang, T. Lehman, and P. Ruth, "FABRIC: A National-Scale Programmable Experimental Network Infrastructure," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 38--47, 2019.
[12]
M. Alizadeh, A. Greenberg, D. A. Maltz, J. Padhye, P. Patel, B. Prabhakar, S. Sengupta, and M. Sridharan, "Data Center TCP (DCTCP)," SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., vol. 40, no. 4, p. 63--74, aug 2010. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/1851275.1851192
[13]
B. Briscoe and A. S. Ahmed, "TCP Prague Fall-back on Detection of a Classic ECN AQM," 2021. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00710
[14]
A. Dhamdhere, D. D. Clark, A. Gamero-Garrido, M. Luckie, R. K. P. Mok, G. Akiwate, K. Gogia, V. Bajpai, A. C. Snoeren, and K. Claffy, "Inferring persistent interdomain congestion," in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, ser. SIGCOMM '18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018, p. 1--15. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3230543.3230549
[15]
A. Akella, S. Seshan, and A. Shaikh, "An empirical evaluation of wide-area internet bottlenecks," in Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, ser. SIGMETRICS '03. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2003, p. 316--317. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/781027.781075
[16]
K. D. Schepper and B. Briscoe, "The Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Protocol for Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S)," RFC 9331, Jan. 2023. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9331/
[17]
J. Livingood, "Comcast Kicks Off Industry's First Low Latency DOCSIS Field Trials," https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-multi-gig-symmetrical-speeds-world-first-docsis-4-deployment, 2023.
[18]
G. White, "L4S Interop Lays Groundwork for 10G Metaverse," https://www.cablelabs.com/blog/l4s-interop-lays-groundwork-for-10g-metaverse, 2022.
[19]
N. Corporation, "Nokia collaborates with Hololight to deliver reliable immersive XR experiences with latency-improving technology L4S," https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2023/11/02/nokia-collaborates-with-hololight-to-deliver-reliable-immersive-xr-experiences-with-latency-improving-technology-l4s/, 2023.
[20]
J. Livingood, "Comcast L4S Field Trial Update," https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/118/materials/slides-118-tsvwg-sessa-61-l4s-experience-01, 2023.
[21]
P. Heist, "sce-l4s-bakeoff," https://github.com/heistp/sce-l4s-bakeoff, 2019.
[22]
P. Heist, "L4S Tests," https://github.com/heistp/l4s-tests, 2021.
[23]
T. Henderson, O. Tilmans, and G. White, "Testbed and Simulation Results for TSVWG Scenarios," 2019, accessed: 2024-06-12. [Online]. Available: https://l4s.cablelabs.com/l4s_issues.html
[24]
G. W. Bob Briscoe, Koen De Schepper, "L4S Status Update," Presented at IETF 112, Online, 2021, accessed: 2024-06-12. [Online]. Available: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/112/materials/slides-112-tsvwg-sessa-32-l4s-ecn-drafts-01.pdf
[25]
O. T. G. W. Bob Briscoe, Koen De Schepper, "Low Latency Low Loss Scalable Throughput (L4S)," https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/interim-2020-tsvwg-01/slides/slides-interim-2020-tsvwg-01-sessa-l4s-tcp-prague-update-00.pdf, February 2020, interim 2020 TSVWG Meeting.
[26]
A. Srivastava, F. Fund, and S. S. Panwar, "Coexistence of delay-based TCP congestion control: Challenges and opportunities," in 2022 IEEE International Workshop Technical Committee on Communications Quality and Reliability (CQR). IEEE, 2022, pp. 43--48.
[27]
Ł. Budzisz, R. Stanojevic, A. Schlote, F. Baker, and R. Shorten, "On the fair coexistence of loss-and delay-based TCP," IEEE/ACM transactions on networking, vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1811--1824, 2011.
[28]
Y. Zhu, M. Ghobadi, V. Misra, and J. Padhye, "ECN or Delay: Lessons Learnt from Analysis of DCQCN and TIMELY," in Proceedings of the 12th International on Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, ser. CoNEXT '16. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2016, p. 313--327. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/2999572.2999593
[29]
D. BoruOljira, K.-J. Grinnemo, A. Brunstrom, and J. Taheri, "Validating the sharing behavior and latency characteristics of the L4S architecture," ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 37--44, 2020.
[30]
A. Mishra, X. Sun, A. Jain, S. Pande, R. Joshi, and B. Leong, "The Great Internet TCP Congestion Control Census," Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst., vol. 3, no. 3, dec 2019. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3366693
[31]
K. Nichols and V. Jacobson, "Controlling Queue Delay," Commun. ACM, vol. 55, no. 7, p. 42--50, jul 2012. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/2209249.2209264
[32]
L4S development hub, "Linux kernel tree with L4S patches," https://github.com/L4STeam/linux, 2024.
[33]
S. Ha, I. Rhee, and L. Xu, "CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant," SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev., vol. 42, no. 5, p. 64--74, jul 2008. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/1400097.1400105
[34]
Google, "BBR - Source code," https://github.com/google/bbr, 2024.
[35]
H. Lim, S. Kim, J. Sippe, J. Kim, G. White, C.-H. Lee, E. Wustrow, K. Lee, D. Grunwald, and S. Ha, "A Fresh Look at ECN Traversal in the Wild," 2022.
[36]
R. Ware, M. K. Mukerjee, S. Seshan, and J. Sherry, "Modeling BBR's Interactions with Loss-Based Congestion Control," in Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference, ser. IMC '19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019, p. 137--143. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355604
[37]
V. Arun, M. Alizadeh, and H. Balakrishnan, "Starvation in end-to-end congestion control," in Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference, ser. SIGCOMM '22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2022, p. 177--192. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544216.3544223
[38]
R. Ware, M. K. Mukerjee, S. Seshan, and J. Sherry, "Beyond Jain's Fairness Index: Setting the Bar For The Deployment of Congestion Control Algorithms," in Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, ser. HotNets '19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019, p. 17--24. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3365609.3365855

Index Terms

  1. To switch or not to switch to TCP Prague? Incentives for adoption in a partial L4S deployment

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ANRW '24: Proceedings of the 2024 Applied Networking Research Workshop
    July 2024
    110 pages
    ISBN:9798400707230
    DOI:10.1145/3673422
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    In-Cooperation

    • IRTF: Internet Research Task Force

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 20 July 2024

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. AQM
    2. Congestion Control
    3. L4S
    4. Low Latency
    5. TCP

    Qualifiers

    • Short-paper
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Conference

    ANRW '24
    Sponsor:
    ANRW '24: Applied Networking Research Workshop
    July 23, 2024
    AA, Vancouver, Canada

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 58 submissions, 59%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • 0
      Total Citations
    • 65
      Total Downloads
    • Downloads (Last 12 months)65
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)32
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media