Analysis for Multiple Data Plane Solutions of Computing-Aware Traffic Steering

Introduction As described in , traffic steering which takes computing resource conditions and metrics into account would benefit computing-related services, including latency-sensitive services which rely upon the use of augmented reality or virtual reality (AR/VR) techniques. Computing-Aware Traffic Steering (CATS) aims to solve the problem that how the network edge can steer traffic between clients of a service and sites offering the service. To enable the computing- and network-aware traffic steering decisions, awareness of computing information and network information are fundamental premises. The CATS architecture is an overlay framework for the selection of the most appropriate service contact instance for placing a service request. However, the CATS framework does not assume any specific data plane and control plane solutions. This document proposes several potential data plane solutions for the realization of CATS, and compares their key features and main application scenarios. These solutions use an anycast IP address or digital identification as the Computing-aware Service ID (CS-ID) associated with a service.

Requirements Language The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Terminology This document makes use of the terms defined in .

Overview As illustrated in Figure 1, underlay network infrastructure and devices are deployed between an ingress CATS-Router and service contact instances, where corresponding CATS functionality is deployed at the ingress CATS-Router 1 and egress CATS-Router 2/3. An egress CAT-router connects to multiple service sites. At a specific service site, single service contact instance or multiple service contact instances are deployed. CATS overlay encapsulation is established from the ingress CATS-Router to the egress CATS-Router connected to the service site. For ease of description in this document, it is assumed that a specific tunnel between CATS-Routers is an SRv6 Policy[RFC8986].

CATS Data Plane Workflow Control plane: The ingress CATS-Router ("CATS-Router 1") receives service routes from the egress CATS-Routers ("CATS-Router 2/3") , including network and computing indicators. The C-PS determines an associated egress CATS-Router by selecting the most appropriate service site and corresponding network forwarding path based on routing strategies and policies, utilizing collected network and computing metrics. The ingress CATS-Router generates the SRv6 tunnel encapsulation from itself to the egress CATS router based on a calculated and matched SR policy. Data plane: From the client to the service contact instance, packet processing and handling procedures are generally divided into at least the following successive three phases:

Phase I: A service request carrying a CATS Service ID (CS-ID) needs to be routed to the ingress CATS-Router through the access network. The CS-ID can be carried in multiple methods: 1) placing the CS-ID in the destination address field, where the destination address would be encoded with the CS-ID as spcific anycast IPs; 2) placing the CS-ID in an IPv6 extension header, and the destination address would inherit the IP address of the ingress CATS-Router.
Phase II: When packets of a service request are received by an ingress CATS-Router, it is classified and determined by the C-TC component. When a matching entry of service routes is found for this request, the ingress CATS-Router encapsulates it and forwards the packets to the C-PS selected egress CATS-Router via the matching SR tunnel.
Phase III: At egress CATS-Router, the packets are decapsulated and successively forwarded according to local entries, and the packets are sent to a corresponding selected service contact instance.

Solution 1: Service ID carried in an anycast IP with bidirectional address translation mode

Phase I: The packet of a service request carries a CS-ID in its destination address field. The destination address is encoded as an anycast IP address and would be routable within the access network. This prerequisite requires that anycast prefix routes are distributed throughout the access network. Service packets can be forwarded to the ingress CATS-Router for processing in a successive Phase II.
Phase II: The ingress CATS-Router looks up with the corresponding service routing table indexed by the service ID in the destination address of the packets, determines appropriate service route entries and routes the packet to the SR policy by encapsulating the SRH tunnel header, and forwards the packet to the egress CATS-Router for afterwards procedures in phase III.
Phase III: The egress CATS-Router decapsulates the SRH tunnel encapsulation of the packets. Since there might be multiple service instances which provide the same service deployed under the same CATS-Router, the packets carrying anycast IP addresses cannot be directly routed to a corresponding service contact instance. NAT (Network Address Translation) needs to be performed for the packets, and the packets are forwarded to the corresponding service contact instance by the lookup among service routes entries and a corresponding translation of destination address.

Anycast IP is used as the destination address of the end-to-end session. Since the destination address of the user packet is translated to the IP address of the service contact instance in phase III. After the service contact instance receives the packet, the service contact instance correspondingly utilizes the incoming source address as the destination address of the response packet, and uses the IP address of the service contact instance as the source address. To eliminate influences on the host protocol stack for service contact and session establishment, the source address of the response packet must be translated to the corresponding upstream destination address, for which an SNAT process should be performed for the response packets in a downstream workflow. Specifically, the NAT (Network Address Translation) function can be provided by either the egress CATS-Router or the ingress CATS-Router. In the case of the egress CATS-Router, a special SID (Segment ID) needs to be extended to indicate the NAT translation. However, for the ingress CATS-Router, no such special SID is required; it can determine the need for NAT based on the context. This allows for flexibility in choosing different solutions based on actual circumstances.

Solution 2: Service ID carried in the IPv6 EH with unidirectional address translation mode Among up-to-date application scenarios, some newly introduced transport protocols would support the change of connecting IP address without interrupting the traffic flows and disconnecting the connection session. In these cases, the CATS-Routers would modify the destination address of the corresponding packets to the IP address of the selected service contact instance when the client sends its upstream packet, and establish a connection through the downstream response packet from the service instance even the IP address is modified. Corresponding capable transport protocols are outside the scope of this document.

Phase I: Forward packets to the ingress CATS-Router, the destination address of the packet might be set to the ingress CATS-Router's IP address, and the CS-ID is carried in the IPv6 extension header. The packet is then forwarded through the access network to the ingress CATS-Router, at which it is processed in phase II.
Phase II: The ingress CATS-Router looks up with the corresponding service routing table indexed by the service ID in the IPv6 extension header of the packets, determines appropriate service route entries and routes the packet to the SR policy by encapsulating the SRH tunnel header, and forwards the packet to the egress CATS-Router for afterwards procedures in phase III.
Phase III: The egress CATS-Router decapsulates the SRH tunnel encapsulation of the packets. The destination address in the packet needs to be replaced with the IP address of the corresponding service contact instance. The packet is then forwarded to the corresponding service contact instance.

To adapt to the modification of the destination address on the terminal and service host side, the protocol stack should be correspondingly modified and upgraded. To minimize the changes, a new protocol header can be added in the extension header, which will handle the address changes. As a result, downstream packets do not require Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) translation. Under the above conditions, there is only a unidirectional address translation process in Solution 2. In this case, the CATS-Router does not even need to maintain and manage session states for traffic flows, including unidirectional translation entries, etc. This reduces the complexity of the router but increases the workload on the terminal-side protocol.

Solution 3: Service ID carried in an anycast IP with TUNNEL/MAC mode

Phase I: The packet of a service request carries a CS-ID in its destination address field. The destination address is encoded as an anycast IP address and would be routable within the access network. This prerequisite requires that anycast prefix routes are distributed throughout the access network. Service packets can be forwarded to the ingress CATS-Router for processing in a successive Phase II.
Phase II: The ingress CATS-Router looks up with the corresponding service routing table indexed by the service ID in the destination address of the packets, determines appropriate service route entries and routes the packet to the SR policy byencapsulating the SRH tunnel header, and forwards the packet to the egress CATS-Router for afterwards procedures in phase III.
Phase III: The egress CATS-Router decapsulates the SRH tunnel encapsulation of the packets. Since there might be multiple service instances which provide the same service deployed under the same CATS-Router, the packets carrying anycast IP addresses cannot be directly routed to a corresponding service contact instance. Two optional methods can be applied to forward service packets to the service contact instance: 1) Based on the IP addresses of the CATS-Router and service instance, a bidirectional tunnel (such as GRE and GIF) would be directly established between them for forwarding packets to the service instance. This method can be capable for both L2/L3 network;2) With the learned ARPs in accordance with the service instance IP addresses, and utilizes the corresponding ARP MAC as the destination MAC addresses of user packets, and deliver the packets to the service instance through layer-2 switching. This method can only be capable for the L2 network.

It should be noted that the client and service host stacks of this solution are not modified, and there is no IP address translation process in the above solution. However, the service instance needs to support a mentioned tunneling model, and some protocol stacks might not support the tunneling functionality.

Solution Comparison Analysis CATS Dataplane Comprehensive Comparison of Solutions

	Solution 1	Solution 2	Solution 3
CATS router requirement	High	Middle	Middle
Client requirement	None	Middle	None
Service host requirement	None	Middle	Low
Forwarding Performance	Low	High	High

As illustrated in Table 1, different solutions have disparate requirements for clients, service hosts, and CATS-Routers, ultimately resulting in different forwarding performances. Generally, solution 1 has the lowest requirements for terminals and service hosts, yet its forwarding performance may be the worst. Solution 2 has the most strict requirements for terminals and service hosts. In most cases, protocol stack modification is applicable to new host protocol stacks. Solution 3 requires the service host's anycast IP to be configured and deployed, and a protocol stack to support tunnels. Both solution 2 and solution 3 can provide satisfying forwarding performance. Additionally, in solution 2 and 3, CATS-Routers are not required to support the full and standard functionality of NAT. To be added.

Security Considerations TBD.

Acknowledgements To be added upon contributions, comments and suggestions.

IANA Considerations TBA