TCP ACK Rate Request Option
draft-gomez-tcpm-ack-rate-request-00

Abstract

TCP Delayed Acknowledgments (ACKs) is a widely deployed mechanism that allows reducing protocol overhead in many scenarios. However, Delayed ACKs may also contribute to suboptimal performance. When a relatively large congestion window (cwnd) can be used, less frequent ACKs may be desirable. On the other hand, in relatively small cwnd scenarios, eliciting an immediate ACK may avoid unnecessary delays that may be incurred by the Delayed ACKs mechanism. This document specifies the TCP ACK Rate Request (TARR) option. This option allows a sender to indicate the ACK rate to be used by a receiver, and it also allows to request an immediate ACK from a receiver.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Conventions used in this document
• 3. TCP ACK Rate Request Functionality
• 3.1. Sender behavior
• 3.2. Receiver behavior
• 4. Option Format
• 5. IANA Considerations
• 6. Security Considerations
• 7. Acknowledgments
• 8. References
• 8.1. Normative References
• 8.2. Informative References
• Authors' Addresses

1. Introduction

Delayed Acknowledgments (ACKs) were specified for TCP with the aim to reduce protocol overhead [RFC1122]. With Delayed ACKs, a TCP delays sending an ACK by up to 500 ms (often 200 ms, with lower values in recent implementations such as ~50 ms also reported), and typically sends an ACK for at least every second segment received in a stream of full-sized segments. This allows combining several segments into a single one (e.g. the application layer response to an application layer data message, and the corresponding ACK), and also saves up to one of every two ACKs, under many traffic patterns (e.g. bulk transfers). The "SHOULD" requirement level for implementing Delayed ACKs in RFC 1122, along with its expected benefits, has led to a widespread deployment of this mechanism.

However, there exist scenarios where Delayed ACKs contribute to suboptimal performance. We next roughly classify such scenarios into two main categories, in terms of the congestion window (cwnd) size and the Maximum Segment Size (MSS) that would be used therein: i) "large" cwnd scenarios (i.e. cwnd >> MSS), and ii) "small" cwnd scenarios (e.g. cwnd up to ~MSS).

In "large" cwnd scenarios, increasing the number of data segments after which a receiver transmits an ACK beyond the typical one (i.e. 2 when Delayed ACKs are used) may provide significant benefits. One example is mitigating performance limitations due to asymmetric path capacity (e.g. when the reverse path is significantly limited in comparison to the forward path) [RFC3449]. Another advantage is reducing the computational cost both at the sender and the receiver, and reducing network packet load, due to the lower number of ACKs involved.

In many "small" cwnd scenarios, a sender may want to request the receiver to acknowledge a data segment immediately (i.e. without the additional delay incurred by the Delayed ACKs mechanism). In high bit rate environments (e.g. data centers), a flow's fare share of the available Bandwidth Delay Product (BDP) may be in the order of one MSS, or even less. For an accordingly set cwnd value (e.g. cwnd up to MSS), Delayed ACKs would incur a delay that is several orders of magnitude greater than the RTT, severely degrading performance. Note that the Nagle algorithm may produce the same effect for some traffic patterns in the same type of environments [RFC8490]. In addition, when transactional data exchanges are performed over TCP, or when the cwnd size has been reduced, eliciting an immediate ACK from the receiver may avoid idle times and allow timely continuation of data transmission and/or cwnd growth, contributing to maintaining low latency. Furthermore, in IoT scenarios, where small messages may be sent infrequently, Delayed ACKs may also deplete the scarce resources of IoT devices unnecessarily [I-D.gomez-tcpm-delack-suppr-reqs].

With the aim to provide a tool for performance improvement in both "large" and "small" cwnd scenarios, this document specifies the TCP ACK Rate request (TARR) option. This option allows a sender to indicate the ACK rate to be used by a receiver, and it also allows to request an immediate ACK from a receiver.

2. Conventions used in this document

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].

3. TCP ACK Rate Request Functionality

This section defines the sender and receiver behaviors for devices that support the TARR option.

3.1. Sender behavior

A TCP sender MAY request a receiver to modify the ACK rate of the latter to one ACK every R full-sized data segments received from the sender. This request is performed by the sender by including the TARR option in the TCP header of a data segment. The TARR option carries the R value requested by the sender (see section 4). For the described purpose, the value of R MUST NOT be zero.

When a TCP sender needs a data segment to be acknowledged immediately by the receiving TCP, the sender includes the TARR option in the TCP header of the data segment, with a value for R equal to zero.

TO-DO: option negotiation.

3.2. Receiver behavior

A receiving TCP conforming to this specification MUST process the TARR option of a received data segment.

When the TARR option of a received segment carries an R value different from zero, the receiving TCP MUST modify its ACK rate to one ACK every R full-sized received data segments from the sender, and MUST keep that ACK rate unless a new TARR carrying a different R value is received from the same sender.

If the R value of the TARR option of a received segment is set to zero, the receiving TCP MUST send an ACK immediately, even if the receiving TCP implements the Delayed ACKs mechanism. This kind of request from the sender MUST NOT be understood by the receiver as a request to modify its ACK rate.

TO-DO: option negotiation.

4. Option Format

The TARR option has the format and content shown in Fig. 1.

    
                                                  
      0          1          2          3
      01234567 89012345 67890123 45678901
     +--------+--------+--------+--------+
     |  Kind  | Length |       ExID      |
     +--------+--------+--------+--------+
     |   R    |
     +--------+

        

Figure 1: TCP ACK Rate Request option format.

Kind: The Kind field value is TBD.

Length: The Length field value is 5 bytes.

ExID: The experiment ID field size is 2 bytes, and its value is 0x00AC.

R: The size of this field is 1 byte. If all bits of this field are set to 0, the field indicates a request by the sender for the receiver to trigger an ACK immediately. Otherwise, the field carries the binary encoding of the number of full-sized segments received after which the receiver is requested by the sender to send an ACK.

5. IANA Considerations

This document specifies a new TCP option (TCP ACK Rate Request) that uses the shared experimental options format [RFC6994], with ExID in network-standard byte order.

The authors plan to request the allocation of ExID value 0x00AC for the TCP option specified in this document.

6. Security Considerations

TBD

7. Acknowledgments

Bob Briscoe, Jonathan Morton, Richard Scheffenegger, Neal Cardwell, Michael Tuexen, Yuchung Cheng, Matt Mathis, Jana Iyengar, and Gorry Fairhurst provided useful comments and input for this document.

Carles Gomez has been funded in part by the Spanish Government through project PID2019-106808RA-I00, and by Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca del Departament d'Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya 2017 through grant SGR 376.

8. References

8.1. Normative References

8.2. Informative References

Authors' Addresses