[e2e] Re: Control traffic: how many % of payload traffic?

James M. Polk jmpolk at cisco.com
Fri May 25 10:56:15 PDT 2001


Michael

Does it take that much more control traffic for a Video Stream than a Voice
Stream? If you model the restriction based on a ratio that is fixed regardless
of Media type, I think you'll guarantee wasted bandwidth. 

Another example, does an MPEG4 media flow require more control traffic/packets
than an MPEG2 flow? And are the proportional?

The flows I consider to be latency sensitive all the time, yet control is based
much more on a reliable receipt model, for efficient forwarding, but not
real-time, is necessary.

All I advocating is the ratio will (likely) be non-linear as the media flow
increases in bandwidth per flow.

At 12:18 PM 5/25/2001 +0200, Michael Welzl wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>To achieve scalability, it seems reasonable to restrict the amount of
>control traffic which is related to a payload traffic stream by a fraction
>of the payload traffic: this way, the overall control traffic remains a
>fraction of the related payload traffic no matter how many senders there
>are.
>
>For Internet traffic, it may also make sense to restrict control traffic by
>the amount of packets, so not only traffic forwarding but also per-packet
>header processing is taken into account. So a rule should probably be:
>
>control traffic = min (x % of payload traffic, every yth payload packet)
>
>The values x and y must be predefined (if a single sender exceeds a certain
>x or y, the concept won't work).
>
>My question is: how do I come up with appropriate values for x and y?
>The answer is probably a trade off between wasted bandwidth and processing
>cost vs. gain from control traffic; but these things are very hard to
>quantify.
>For instance, how did the AVT working group come up with the value of 5% for
>RTCP traffic?
>
>>From RFC1889:
>   The control traffic should be limited to a small and known fraction
>   of the session bandwidth: small so that the primary function of the
>   transport protocol to carry data is not impaired; known so that the
>   control traffic can be included in the bandwidth specification given
>   to a resource reservation protocol, and so that each participant can
>   independently calculate its share. It is suggested that the fraction
>   of the session bandwidth allocated to RTCP be fixed at 5%. While the
>   value of this and other constants in the interval calculation is not
>   critical, all participants in the session must use the same values so
>   the same interval will be calculated. Therefore, these constants
>   should be fixed for a particular profile.
>
>My interpretation of "all participants in the session must use the same
>values" is that RTCP will scale "within a session". But why 5%? Why not 10?
>or 15? or 1?
>This question may not be as critical for RTCP as it is for control traffic
>which needs extra processing by routers.
>
>Cheers,
>Michael
>
>

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James M. Polk
Consulting Engineer
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