Re: [aqm] Follow-up: PIE performance in cable modem environments

[Preethi Natarajan <[e-mail]>]

Hi Greg,

As other posts point out, the byte-mode operation has been around for a
while and it is not unique/new to PIE.

We weren't aware of Bob Briscoe's BCP draft until recently. We understand
the concerns mentioned here. In fact, we encountered the DropTail's
preferential treatment for small packets in our simulations (mentioned in
the BCP draft) and that was our motivation to  experiment with byte-mode.

We think that a good alternative to byte-mode would be ToS/DiffServe-field
based differential dropping, similar to WRED, since that would give similar
benefits as byte-mode. That way, we don't have to stick to byte-mode based
approach for PIE.

Regards,
The PIE Team

From:  Greg White <[e-mail]>
Date:  Friday, May 3, 2013 3:55 PM
To:  Preethi Natarajan <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]"
<[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Subject:  Re: [aqm] Follow-up: PIE performance in cable modem environments

Preethi,

I did a diff on the new version of the PIE code vs the earlier release and
found, as you stated, that the basic algorithm hasn't changed.  I do see
some other improvements/changes though.  One which, I think, bears
discussion is the weighting of packet drops based on size.

In the new code there is the option (turned on in the simulations I reported
on in my paper) to drop packets according to p*pkt_size/mean_pkt_size where
p is the drop probability calculated by the PIE control law. This serves to
significantly decrease the drop probability of the small VoIP and gaming
packets, which may be sensitive to loss (from a QoE perspective) and
non-responsive to loss (from a congestion control perspective).  This is
evidenced by the low packet loss rate for gaming traffic that I reported in
my paper.

However, I worry that the unintended consequence may be that this weighting
incentivizes application developers toward the use of small packets, which
seems ill advised.

Thoughts?

-Greg



From: Preethi Natarajan <[e-mail]>
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 5:48 PM
To: Greg White <[e-mail]>, Preethi Natarajan
<[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]"
<[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Cc: "Rong Pan (ropan)" <[e-mail]>, "Bill Ver Steeg (versteb)"
<[e-mail]>, "Chiara Piglione (cpiglion)" <[e-mail]>,
"Mythili Suryanarayana Prabhu (mysuryan)" <[e-mail]>, "Fred Baker
(fred)" <[e-mail]>, Dan Rice <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: [aqm] Follow-up: PIE performance in cable modem environments

Hi,

Thank you Greg for the update and the link to the white paper.

We wanted to quickly clarify about how we tuned PIE for DOCSIS.

The basic PIE algorithm has not changed. We updated the simulation code with
the missing line mentioned below (which was a bug). The DOCSIS MAC layer has
this special nature of stop-and-go with 5ms-6ms request and grant delay.
This requires adjustment of any algorithm: for example  CoDel has to
increase its target delay from 5ms to a higher value. Similarly, our new
parameters are to make PIE adjust faster for the DOCSIS stop-and-go
behavior. Please note that eventually all these design parameters will be
automatically set, users of the PIE algorithm would not be required to set
any design parameters.

Again, many thanks for your update.
PIE team

From: Greg White <[e-mail]>
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 3:54 PM
To: Preethi Natarajan <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]"
<[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]"
<[e-mail]>
Cc: "Rong Pan (ropan)" <[e-mail]>, "Bill Ver Steeg (versteb)"
<[e-mail]>, "Chiara Piglione (cpiglion)" <[e-mail]>,
"Mythili Suryanarayana Prabhu (mysuryan)" <[e-mail]>, "Fred Baker
(fred)" <[e-mail]>, Daniel Rice <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: [aqm] Follow-up: PIE performance in cable modem environments

Additionally, I've re-run my suite of simulations using the updated PIE code
from Cisco.  The results (in much more detail than I presented at ICCRG) are
documented in a white paper available here:
Active Queue Management Algorithms for DOCSIS 3.0
<http://www.cablelabs.com/downloads/pubs/Active_Queue_Management_Algorithms_
DOCSIS_3_0.pdf> 

Thanks to Preethi, Rong, et al. for debugging and tuning PIE to work well in
the cable environment, and for sharing the resulting code.

Best Regards,
Greg

From: Preethi Natarajan <[e-mail]>
Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:18 PM
To: "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>,
"[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Cc: "Rong Pan (ropan)" <[e-mail]>, "Bill Ver Steeg (versteb)"
<[e-mail]>, "Chiara Piglione (cpiglion)" <[e-mail]>,
"Mythili Suryanarayana Prabhu (mysuryan)" <[e-mail]>, "Fred Baker
(fred)" <[e-mail]>
Subject: [aqm] Follow-up: PIE performance in cable modem environments

Hello,

This is a follow-up to Greg White's (from Cable Labs) talk at the recent
ICCRG meeting on PIE's performance in cable modem environments.

Post the meeting, Greg was kind to share his ns-2 DOCSIS model with us. We
investigated PIE's performance using this model. The key items from this
investigation: 
1. Bug in PIE code: The previous PIE release (that Greg used for
evaluations) was missing a line of code. This missing line brings down drop
probability under certain conditions and turns out to be critical for the
cable modem scenario. Without this line of code, the drop probability
remains high and takes longer to come down even when the queue delay has
remained lower than the reference. The updated ns-2 PIE code can be found
here ‹ ftp://ftpeng.cisco.com/pie/.
2. Bug in ns-2 TCP/Linux: Greg's cable modem simulations used the TCP Cubic
variant. We discovered a serious bug in ns-2 TCP/Linux Agent (confirmed by
Dr. Injong Rhee's team) that makes TCP/Cubic senders very aggressive and
unresponsive to packet drops/notifications, pretty much like UDP traffic.
Please find more details about the bug here --
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3608750&group_id=149743&atid
=775392.
We are working with Cable Labs to verify the cable modem results, they'll
soon be available on our FTP site along with the PIE code.

A technical paper about PIE was recently accepted at the IEEE Conference on
High Performance Switching and Routing 2013. A copy of the paper is attached
here.

The Linux PIE implementation is expected to be ready by next week and we'll
follow-up on that as well.

Many thanks,
Preethi on behalf of PIE team.