QoS for ICN: Considerations in the Development of a QoS Architecture for CCNx-Like Information-Centric Networking Protocols

Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)                              D. Oran
Request for Comments: 9064           Network Systems Research and Design
Category: Informational                                        June 2021
ISSN: 2070-1721


 Considerations in the Development of a QoS Architecture for CCNx-Like
                Information-Centric Networking Protocols

Abstract

   This is a position paper.  It documents the author's personal views
   on how Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities ought to be accommodated
   in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) protocols like Content-
   Centric Networking (CCNx) or Named Data Networking (NDN), which
   employ flow-balanced Interest/Data exchanges and hop-by-hop
   forwarding state as their fundamental machinery.  It argues that such
   protocols demand a substantially different approach to QoS from that
   taken in TCP/IP and proposes specific design patterns to achieve both
   classification and differentiated QoS treatment on both a flow and
   aggregate basis.  It also considers the effect of caches in addition
   to memory, CPU, and link bandwidth as resources that should be
   subject to explicitly unfair resource allocation.  The proposed
   methods are intended to operate purely at the network layer,
   providing the primitives needed to achieve transport- and higher-
   layer QoS objectives.  It explicitly excludes any discussion of
   Quality of Experience (QoE), which can only be assessed and
   controlled at the application layer or above.

   This document is not a product of the IRTF Information-Centric
   Networking Research Group (ICNRG) but has been through formal Last
   Call and has the support of the participants in the research group
   for publication as an individual submission.

Status of This Memo

   This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
   published for informational purposes.

   This document is a product of the Internet Research Task Force
   (IRTF).  The IRTF publishes the results of Internet-related research
   and development activities.  These results might not be suitable for
   deployment.  This RFC represents the individual opinion(s) of one or
   more members of the Information-Centric Networking Research Group of
   the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).  Documents approved for
   publication by the IRSG are not candidates for any level of Internet
   Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9064.

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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction
     1.1.  Applicability Assessment by ICNRG Chairs
   2.  Requirements Language
   3.  Background on Quality of Service in Network Protocols
     3.1.  Basics on How ICN Protocols like NDN and CCNx Work
     3.2.  Congestion Control Basics Relevant to ICN
   4.  What Can We Control to Achieve QoS in ICN?
   5.  How Does This Relate to QoS in TCP/IP?
   6.  Why Is ICN Different?  Can We Do Better?
     6.1.  Equivalence Class Capabilities
     6.2.  Topology Interactions with QoS
     6.3.  Specification of QoS Treatments
     6.4.  ICN Forwarding Semantics Effect on QoS
     6.5.  QoS Interactions with Caching
   7.  Strawman Principles for an ICN QoS Architecture
     7.1.  Can Intserv-Like Traffic Control in ICN Provide Richer QoS
           Semantics?
   8.  IANA Considerations
   9.  Security Considerations
   10. References
     10.1.  Normative References
     10.2.  Informative References
   Author's Address

1.  Introduction

   The TCP/IP protocol suite used on today's Internet has over 30 years
   of accumulated research and engineering into the provisioning of QoS
   machinery, employed with varying success in different environments.
   ICN protocols like NDN [NDN] and CCNx [RFC8569] [RFC8609] have an
   accumulated ten years of research and very little deployment.  We
   therefore have the opportunity to either recapitulate the approaches
   taken with TCP/IP (e.g., Intserv [RFC2998] and Diffserv [RFC2474]) or
   design a new architecture and associated mechanisms aligned with the
   properties of ICN protocols, which differ substantially from those of
   TCP/IP.  This position paper advocates the latter approach and
   comprises the author's personal views on how QoS capabilities ought
   to be accommodated in ICN protocols like CCNx or NDN.  Specifically,
   these protocols differ in fundamental ways from TCP/IP.  The
   important differences are summarized in Table 1:

   +=============================+====================================+
   |            TCP/IP           |            CCNx or NDN             |
   +=============================+====================================+
   |     Stateless forwarding    |        Stateful forwarding         |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
   |        Simple packets       | Object model with optional caching |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
   |     Pure datagram model     |       Request-response model       |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
   |      Asymmetric routing     |         Symmetric routing          |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
   | Independent flow directions |   Flow balance (see note below)    |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
   |  Flows grouped by IP prefix |    Flows grouped by name prefix    |
   |           and port          |                                    |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+
   |    End-to-end congestion    |   Hop-by-hop congestion control    |
   |           control           |                                    |
   +-----------------------------+------------------------------------+

   Table 1: Differences between IP and ICN Relevant to QoS Architecture

      |  Note: Flow balance is a property of NDN and CCNx that ensures
      |  one Interest packet provokes a response of no more than one
      |  Data packet.  Further discussion of the relevance of this to
      |  QoS can be found in [FLOWBALANCE].

   This document proposes specific design patterns to achieve both flow
   classification and differentiated QoS treatment for ICN on both a
   flow and aggregate basis.  It also considers the effect of caches in
   addition to memory, CPU, and link bandwidth as resources that should
   be subject to explicitly unfair resource allocation.  The proposed
   methods are intended to operate purely at the network layer,
   providing the primitives needed to achieve both transport and higher-
   layer QoS objectives.  It does not propose detailed protocol
   machinery to achieve these goals; it leaves these to supplementary
   specifications, such as [FLOWCLASS] and [DNC-QOS-ICN].  It explicitly
   excludes any discussion of QoE, which can only be assessed and
   controlled at the application layer or above.

   Much of this document is derived from presentations the author has
   given at ICNRG meetings over the last few years that are available
   through the IETF datatracker (see, for example, [Oran2018QoSslides]).

1.1.  Applicability Assessment by ICNRG Chairs

   QoS in ICN is an important topic with a huge design space.  ICNRG has
   been discussing different specific protocol mechanisms as well as
   conceptual approaches.  This document presents architectural
   considerations for QoS, leveraging ICN properties instead of merely
   applying IP-QoS mechanisms, without defining a specific architecture
   or specific protocol mechanisms yet.  However, there is consensus in
   ICNRG that this document, clarifying the author's views, could
   inspire such work and should hence be published as a position paper.

2.  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 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
   capitals, as shown here.

3.  Background on Quality of Service in Network Protocols

   Much of this background material is tutorial and can be simply
   skipped by readers familiar with the long and checkered history of
   quality of service in packet networks.  Other parts of it are
   polemical yet serve to illuminate the author's personal biases and
   technical views.

   All networking systems provide some degree of "quality of service" in
   that they exhibit nonzero utility when offered traffic to carry.  In
   other words, the network is totally useless if it never delivers any
   of the traffic injected by applications.  The term QoS is therefore
   more correctly applied in a more restricted sense to describe systems
   that control the allocation of various resources in order to achieve
   _managed unfairness_.  Absent explicit mechanisms to decide which
   traffic to treat unfairly, most systems try to achieve some form of
   "fairness" in the allocation of resources, optimizing the overall
   utility delivered to all traffic under the constraint of available
   resources.  From this, it should be obvious that you cannot use QoS
   mechanisms to create or otherwise increase resource capacity!  In
   fact, all known QoS schemes have nonzero overhead and hence may
   (albeit slightly) decrease the total resources available to carry
   user traffic.

   Further, accumulated experience seems to indicate that QoS is helpful
   in a fairly narrow range of network conditions:

   *  If your resources are lightly loaded, you don't need it, as
      neither congestive loss nor substantial queuing delay occurs.

   *  If your resources are heavily oversubscribed, it doesn't save you.
      So many users will be unhappy that you are probably not delivering
      a viable service.

   *  Failures can rapidly shift your state from the first above to the
      second, in which case either:

      -  Your QoS machinery cannot respond quickly enough to maintain
         the advertised service quality continuously, or

      -  Resource allocations are sufficiently conservative to result in
         substantial wasted capacity under non-failure conditions.

   Nevertheless, though not universally deployed, QoS is advantageous at
   least for some applications and some network environments.  Some
   examples include:

   *  Applications with steep utility functions [Shenker2006], such as
      real-time multimedia

   *  Applications with safety-critical operational constraints, such as
      avionics or industrial automation

   *  Dedicated or tightly managed networks whose economics depend on
      strict adherence to challenging service level agreements (SLAs)

   Another factor in the design and deployment of QoS is the scalability
   and scope over which the desired service can be achieved.  Here there
   are two major considerations, one technical, the other economic/
   political:

   *  Some signaled QoS schemes, such as the Resource reSerVation
      Protocol (RSVP) [RFC2205], maintain state in routers for each
      flow, which scales linearly with the number of flows.  For core
      routers through which pass millions to billions of flows, the
      memory required is infeasible to provide.

   *  The Internet is comprised of many minimally cooperating autonomous
      systems [AS].  There are practically no successful examples of QoS
      deployments crossing the AS boundaries of multiple service
      providers.  In almost all cases, this limits the applicability of
      QoS capabilities to be intra-domain.

   This document adopts a narrow definition of QoS as _managed
   unfairness_ (see note below).  However, much of the networking
   literature uses the term more colloquially, applying it to any
   mechanism that improves overall performance.  One could use a
   different, broader definition of QoS that encompasses optimizing the
   allocation of network resources across all offered traffic without
   considering individual users' traffic.  A consequence would be the
   need to cover whether (and how) ICN might result in better overall
   performance than IP under constant resource conditions, which is a
   much broader goal than that attempted here.  The chosen narrower
   scope comports with the commonly understood meaning of "QoS" in the
   research community.  Under this scope, and under constant resource
   constraints, the only way to provide traffic discrimination is in
   fact to sacrifice fairness.  Readers assuming the broader context
   will find a large class of proven techniques to be ignored.  This is
   intentional.  Among these are seamless producer mobility schemes like
   MAP-Me [Auge2018] and network coding of ICN data as discussed in
   [NWC-CCN-REQS].

      |  Note: The term _managed unfairness_ used to explain QoS is
      |  generally ascribed to Van Jacobson, who in talks in the late
      |  1990s said, "[The problem we are solving is to] Give 'better'
      |  service to some at the expense of giving worse service to
      |  others.  QoS fantasies to the contrary, it's a zero-sum game.
      |  In other words, QoS is _managed unfairness_."

   Finally, the relationship between QoS and either accounting or
   billing is murky.  Some schemes can accurately account for resource
   consumption and ascertain to which user to allocate the usage.
   Others cannot.  While the choice of mechanism may have important
   practical economic and political consequences for cost and workable
   business models, this document considers none of those things and
   discusses QoS only in the context of providing managed unfairness.

   For those unfamiliar with ICN protocols, a brief description of how
   NDN and CCNx operate as a packet network is in Section 3.1.  Some
   further background on congestion control for ICN follows in
   Section 3.2.

3.1.  Basics on How ICN Protocols like NDN and CCNx Work

   The following summarizes the salient features of the NDN and CCNx ICN
   protocols relevant to congestion control and QoS.  Quite extensive
   tutorial information may be found in a number of places, including
   material available from [NDNTutorials].

   In NDN and CCNx, all protocol interactions operate as a two-way
   handshake.  Named content is requested by a _consumer_ via an
   _Interest message_ that is routed hop-by-hop through a series of
   _forwarders_ until it reaches a node that stores the requested data.
   This can be either the _producer_ of the data or a forwarder holding
   a cached copy of the requested data.  The content matching the name
   in the Interest message is returned to the requester over the
   _inverse_ of the path traversed by the corresponding Interest.

   Forwarding in CCNx and NDN is _per-packet stateful_. Routing
   information to select next hop(s) for an Interest is obtained from a
   _Forwarding Information Base (FIB)_, which is similar in function to
   the FIB in an IP router except that it holds name prefixes rather
   than IP address prefixes.  Conventionally, a _Longest Name Prefix
   Match (LNPM)_ is used for lookup, although other algorithms are
   possible, including controlled flooding and adaptive learning based
   on prior history.

   Each Interest message leaves a trail of "breadcrumbs" as state in
   each forwarder.  This state, held in a data structure known as a
   _Pending Interest Table (PIT)_, is used to forward the returning Data
   message to the consumer.  Since the PIT constitutes per-packet state,
   it is therefore a large consumer of memory resources, especially in
   forwarders carrying high traffic loads over long Round-Trip Time
   (RTT) paths, and hence plays a substantial role as a QoS-controllable
   resource in ICN forwarders.

   In addition to its role in forwarding Interest messages and returning
   the corresponding Data messages, an ICN forwarder can also operate as
   a cache, optionally storing a copy of any Data messages it has seen
   in a local data structure known as a _Content Store (CS)_. Data in
   the CS may be returned in response to a matching Interest rather than
   forwarding the Interest further through the network to the original
   Producer.  Both CCNx and NDN have a variety of ways to configure
   caching, including mechanisms to avoid both cache pollution and cache
   poisoning (these are clearly beyond the scope of this brief
   introduction).

3.2.  Congestion Control Basics Relevant to ICN

   In any packet network that multiplexes traffic among multiple sources
   and destinations, congestion control is necessary in order to:

   1.  Prevent collapse of utility due to overload, where the total
       offered service declines as load increases, perhaps
       precipitously, rather than increasing or remaining flat.

   2.  Avoid starvation of some traffic due to excessive demand by other
       traffic.

   3.  Beyond the basic protections against starvation, achieve
       "fairness" among competing traffic.  Two common objective
       functions are max-min fairness [minmaxfairness] and proportional
       fairness [proportionalfairness], both of which have been
       implemented and deployed successfully on packet networks for many
       years.

   Before moving on to QoS, it is useful to consider how congestion
   control works in NDN or CCNx.  Unlike the IP protocol family, which
   relies exclusively on end-to-end congestion control (e.g., TCP
   [RFC0793], DCCP [RFC4340], SCTP [RFC4960], and QUIC [RFC9000]), CCNx
   and NDN can employ hop-by-hop congestion control.  There is per-
   Interest/Data state at every hop of the path, and therefore
   outstanding Interests provide information that can be used to
   optimize resource allocation for data returning on the inverse path,
   such as bandwidth sharing, prioritization, and overload control.  In
   current designs, this allocation is often done using Interest
   counting.  By accepting one Interest packet from a downstream node,
   this implicitly provides a guarantee (either hard or soft) that there
   is sufficient bandwidth on the inverse direction of the link to send
   back one Data packet.  A number of congestion control schemes have
   been developed for ICN that operate in this fashion, for example,
   [Wang2013], [Mahdian2016], [Song2018], and [Carofiglio2012].  Other
   schemes, like [Schneider2016], neither count nor police Interests but
   instead monitor queues using AQM (active queue management) to mark
   returning Data packets that have experienced congestion.  This later
   class of schemes is similar to those used on IP in the sense that
   they depend on consumers adequately reducing their rate of Interest
   injection to avoid Data packet drops due to buffer overflow in
   forwarders.  The former class of schemes is (arguably) more robust
   against misbehavior by consumers.

   Given the stochastic nature of RTTs, and the ubiquity of wireless
   links and encapsulation tunnels with variable bandwidth, a simple
   scheme that admits Interests only based on a time-invariant estimate
   of the returning link bandwidth will perform poorly.  However, two
   characteristics of NDN and CCNx-like protocols can help substantially
   to improve the accuracy and responsiveness of the bandwidth
   allocation:

   1.  RTT is bounded by the inclusion of an _Interest Lifetime_ in each
       Interest message, which puts an upper bound on the RTT
       uncertainty for any given Interest/Data exchange.  If Interest
       Lifetimes are kept reasonably short (a few RTTs), the allocation
       of local forwarder resources do not have to deal with an
       arbitrarily long tail.  One could in fact do a deterministic
       allocation on this basis, but the result would be highly
       pessimistic.  Nevertheless, having a cutoff does improve the
       performance of an optimistic allocation scheme.

   2.  A congestion marking scheme like that used in Explicit Congestion
       Notification (ECN) can be used to mark returning Data packets if
       the inverse link starts experiencing long queue occupancy or
       other congestion indication.  Unlike TCP/IP, where the rate
       adjustment can only be done end-to-end, this feedback is usable
       immediately by the downstream ICN forwarder, and the Interest
       shaping rate is lowered after a single link RTT.  This may allow
       rate adjustment schemes that are less pessimistic than the
       Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) scheme with .5
       multiplier that is commonly used on TCP/IP networks.  It also
       allows the rate adjustments to be spread more accurately among
       the Interest/Data flows traversing a link sending congestion
       signals.

   A useful discussion of these properties and how they demonstrate the
   advantages of ICN approaches to congestion control can be found in
   [Carofiglio2016].

4.  What Can We Control to Achieve QoS in ICN?

   QoS is achieved through managed unfairness in the allocation of
   resources in network elements, particularly in the routers that
   forward ICN packets.  Hence, the first-order questions are the
   following: Which resources need to be allocated?  How do you
   ascertain which traffic gets those allocations?  In the case of CCNx
   or NDN, the important network element resources are given in Table 2:

    +=============================+===================================+
    | Resource                    | ICN Usage                         |
    +=============================+===================================+
    | Communication link capacity | buffering for queued packets      |
    +-----------------------------+-----------------------------------+
    | CS capacity                 | to hold cached data               |
    +-----------------------------+-----------------------------------+
    | Forwarder memory            | for the PIT                       |
    +-----------------------------+-----------------------------------+
    | Compute capacity            | for forwarding packets, including |
    |                             | the cost of FIB lookups           |
    +-----------------------------+-----------------------------------+

               Table 2: ICN-Related Network Element Resources

   For these resources, any QoS scheme has to specify two things:

   1.  How do you create _equivalence classes_ (a.k.a. flows) of traffic
       to which different QoS treatments are applied?

   2.  What are the possible treatments and how are those mapped to the
       resource allocation algorithms?

   Two critical facts of life come into play when designing a QoS
   scheme.  First, the number of equivalence classes that can be
   simultaneously tracked in a network element is bounded by both memory
   and processing capacity to do the necessary lookups.  One can allow
   very fine-grained equivalence classes but not be able to employ them
   globally because of scaling limits of core routers.  That means it is
   wise to either restrict the range of equivalence classes or allow
   them to be _aggregated_, trading off accuracy in policing traffic
   against ability to scale.

   Second, the flexibility of expressible treatments can be tightly
   constrained by both protocol encoding and algorithmic limitations.
   The ability to encode the treatment requests in the protocol can be
   limited -- as it is for IP where there are only six of the Type of
   Service (TOS) bits available for Diffserv treatments.  However, an
   equal or more important issue is whether there are practical traffic
   policing, queuing, and pacing algorithms that can be combined to
   support a rich set of QoS treatments.

   The two considerations above in combination can easily be
   substantially more expressive than what can be achieved in practice
   with the available number of queues on real network interfaces or the
   amount of per-packet computation needed to enqueue or dequeue a
   packet.

5.  How Does This Relate to QoS in TCP/IP?

   TCP/IP has fewer resource types to manage than ICN, and in some
   cases, the allocation methods are simpler, as shown in Table 3:

     +===============+=============+================================+
     | Resource      | IP Relevant | TCP/IP Usage                   |
     +===============+=============+================================+
     | Communication |     YES     | buffering for queued packets   |
     | link capacity |             |                                |
     +---------------+-------------+--------------------------------+
     | CS capacity   |      NO     | no CS in IP                    |
     +---------------+-------------+--------------------------------+
     | Forwarder     |    MAYBE    | not needed for output-buffered |
     | memory        |             | designs (see note below)       |
     +---------------+-------------+--------------------------------+
     | Compute       |     YES     | for forwarding packets, but    |
     | capacity      |             | arguably much cheaper than ICN |
     +---------------+-------------+--------------------------------+

              Table 3: IP-Related Network Element Resources

      |  Note: In an output-buffered design, all packet buffering
      |  resources are associated with the output interfaces, and
      |  neither the receiver interface nor the internal forwarding
      |  buffers can be over-subscribed.  Output-buffered switches or
      |  routers are common but not universal, as they generally require
      |  an internal speedup factor where forwarding capacity is greater
      |  than the sum of the input capacity of the interfaces.

   For these resources, IP has specified three fundamental things, as
   shown in Table 4:

   +=============+====================================================+
   |     What    | How                                                |
   +=============+====================================================+
   | Equivalence | subset+prefix match on IP 5-tuple {SA,DA,SP,DP,PT} |
   |   classes   | SA=Source Address                                  |
   |             | DA=Destination Address                             |
   |             | SP=Source Port                                     |
   |             | DP=Destination Port                                |
   |             | PT=IP Protocol Type                                |
   +-------------+----------------------------------------------------+
   |   Diffserv  | (very) small number of globally-agreed traffic     |
   |  treatments | classes                                            |
   +-------------+----------------------------------------------------+
   |   Intserv   | per-flow parameterized _Controlled Load_ and       |
   |  treatments | _Guaranteed_ service classes                       |
   +-------------+----------------------------------------------------+

     Table 4: Fundamental Protocol Elements to Achieve QoS for TCP/IP

   Equivalence classes for IP can be pairwise, by matching against both
   source and destination address+port, pure group using only
   destination address+port, or source-specific multicast with source
   address+port and destination multicast address+port.

   With Intserv, RSVP [RFC2205] carries two data structures: the Flow
   Specifier (FLOWSPEC) and the Traffic Specifier (TSPEC).  The former
   fulfills the requirement to identify the equivalence class to which
   the QoS being signaled applies.  The latter comprises the desired QoS
   treatment along with a description of the dynamic character of the
   traffic (e.g., average bandwidth and delay, peak bandwidth, etc.).
   Both of these encounter substantial scaling limits, which has meant
   that Intserv has historically been limited to confined topologies,
   and/or high-value usages, like traffic engineering.

   With Diffserv, the protocol encoding (six bits in the TOS field of
   the IP header) artificially limits the number of classes one can
   specify.  These are documented in [RFC4594].  Nonetheless, when used
   with fine-grained equivalence classes, one still runs into limits on
   the number of queues required.

6.  Why Is ICN Different?  Can We Do Better?

   While one could adopt an approach to QoS that mirrors the extensive
   experience with TCP/IP, this would, in the author's view, be a
   mistake.  The implementation and deployment of QoS in IP networks has
   been spotty at best.  There are, of course, economic and political
   reasons as well as technical reasons for these mixed results, but
   there are several architectural choices in ICN that make it a
   potentially much better protocol base to enhance with QoS machinery.
   This section discusses those differences and their consequences.

6.1.  Equivalence Class Capabilities

   First and foremost, hierarchical names are a much richer basis for
   specifying equivalence classes than IP 5-tuples.  The IP address (or
   prefix) can only separate traffic by topology to the granularity of
   hosts and cannot express actual computational instances nor sets of
   data.  Ports give some degree of per-instance demultiplexing, but
   this tends to be both coarse and ephemeral, while confounding the
   demultiplexing function with the assignment of QoS treatments to
   particular subsets of the data.  Some degree of finer granularity is
   possible with IPv6 by exploiting the ability to use up to 64 bits of
   address for classifying traffic.  In fact, the Hybrid Information-
   Centric Networking (hICN) project [HICN], while adopting the request-
   response model of CCNx, uses IPv6 addresses as the available
   namespace, and IPv6 packets (plus "fake" TCP headers) as the wire
   format.

   Nonetheless, the flexibility of tokenized (i.e., strings treated as
   opaque tokens), variable length, hierarchical names allows one to
   directly associate classes of traffic for QoS purposes with the
   structure of an application namespace.  The classification can be as
   coarse or fine-grained as desired by the application.  While not
   _always_ the case, there is typically a straightforward association
   between how objects are named and how they are grouped together for
   common treatment.  Examples abound; a number can be conveniently
   found in [FLOWCLASS].

6.2.  Topology Interactions with QoS

   In ICN, QoS is not pre-bound to network topology since names are non-
   topological, unlike unicast IP addresses.  This allows QoS to be
   applied to multi-destination and multipath environments in a
   straightforward manner, rather than requiring either multicast with
   coarse class-based scheduling or complex signaling like that in RSVP
   Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) [RFC3209] that is needed to make point-
   to-multipoint Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) work.

   Because of IP's stateless forwarding model, complicated by the
   ubiquity of asymmetric routes, any flow-based QoS requires state that
   is decoupled from the actual arrival of traffic and hence must be
   maintained, at least as soft state, even during quiescent periods.
   Intserv, for example, requires flow signaling on the order of
   O(number of flows).  ICN, even worst case, requires order of O(number
   of active Interest/Data exchanges), since state can be instantiated
   on arrival of an Interest and removed (perhaps lazily) once the data
   has been returned.

6.3.  Specification of QoS Treatments

   Unlike Intserv, Diffserv eschews signaling in favor of class-based
   configuration of resources and queues in network elements.  However,
   Diffserv limits traffic treatments to a few bits taken from the TOS
   field of IP.  No such wire encoding limitations exist for NDN or
   CCNx, as the protocol is completely TLV (Type-Length-Value) based,
   and one (or even more than one) new field can be easily defined to
   carry QoS treatment information.

   Therefore, there are greenfield possibilities for more powerful QoS
   treatment options in ICN.  For example, IP has no way to express a
   QoS treatment like "try hard to deliver reliably, even at the expense
   of delay or bandwidth".  Such a QoS treatment for ICN could invoke
   native ICN mechanisms, none of which are present in IP, such as the
   following:

   *  Retransmitting in-network in response to hop-by-hop errors
      returned from upstream forwarders

   *  Trying multiple paths to multiple content sources either in
      parallel or serially

   *  Assigning higher precedence for short-term caching to recover from
      downstream (see note below) errors

   *  Coordinating cache utilization with forwarding resources

      |  Note: _Downstream_ refers to the direction Data messages flow
      |  toward the consumer (the issuer of Interests).  Conversely,
      |  _Upstream_ refers to the direction Interests flow toward the
      |  producer of data.

   Such mechanisms are typically described in NDN and CCNx as
   _forwarding strategies_. However, there is little or no guidance for
   which application actions or protocol machinery a forwarder should
   use to select the appropriate forwarding strategy for arriving
   Interest messages.  See [BenAbraham2018] for an investigation of
   these issues.  Associating forwarding strategies with the equivalence
   classes and QoS treatments directly can make them more accessible and
   useful to implement and deploy.

   Stateless forwarding and asymmetric routing in IP limits available
   state/feedback to manage link resources.  In contrast, NDN or CCNx
   forwarding allows all link resource allocation to occur as part of
   Interest forwarding, potentially simplifying things considerably.  In
   particular, with symmetric routing, producers have no control over
   the paths their Data packets traverse; hence, any QoS treatments
   intended to influence routing paths from producer to consumer will
   have no effect.

   One complication in the handling of ICN QoS treatments is not present
   in IP and hence worth mentioning.  CCNx and NDN both perform
   _Interest aggregation_ (see Section 2.4.2 of [RFC8569]).  If an
   Interest arrives matching an existing PIT entry, but with a different
   QoS treatment from an Interest already forwarded, it can be tricky to
   decide whether to aggregate the Interest or forward it, and how to
   keep track of the differing QoS treatments for the two Interests.
   Exploration of the details surrounding these situations is beyond the
   scope of this document; further discussion can be found for the
   general case of flow balance and congestion control in [FLOWBALANCE]
   and specifically for QoS treatments in [DNC-QOS-ICN].

6.4.  ICN Forwarding Semantics Effect on QoS

   IP has three forwarding semantics, with different QoS needs (Unicast,
   Anycast, Multicast).  ICN has the single forwarding semantic, so any
   QoS machinery can be uniformly applied across any request/response
   invocation.  This applies whether the forwarder employs dynamic
   destination routing, multi-destination forwarding with next hops
   tried serially, multi-destination with next hops used in parallel, or
   even localized flooding (e.g., directly on Layer 2 multicast
   mechanisms).  Additionally, the pull-based model of ICN avoids a
   number of thorny multicast QoS problems that IP has (see [Wang2000],
   [RFC3170], and [Tseng2003]).

   The Multi-destination/multipath forwarding model in ICN changes
   resource allocation needs in a fairly deep way.  IP treats all
   endpoints as open-loop packet sources, whereas NDN and CCNx have
   strong asymmetry between producers and consumers as packet sources.

6.5.  QoS Interactions with Caching

   IP has no caching in routers, whereas ICN needs ways to allocate
   cache resources.  Treatments to control caching operation are
   unlikely to look much like the treatments used to control link
   resources.  NDN and CCNx already have useful cache control directives
   associated with Data messages.  The CCNx controls include the
   following:

   ExpiryTime:  time after which a cached Content Object is considered
      expired and MUST no longer be used to respond to an Interest from
      a cache.

   Recommended Cache Time:  time after which the publisher considers the
      Content Object to be of low value to cache.

   See [RFC8569] for the formal definitions.

   ICN flow classifiers, such as those in [FLOWCLASS] can be used to
   achieve soft or hard partitioning (see note below) of cache resources
   in the CS of an ICN forwarder.  For example, cached content for a
   given equivalence class can be considered _fate shared_ in a cache
   whereby objects from the same equivalence class can be purged as a
   group rather than individually.  This can recover cache space more
   quickly and at lower overhead than pure per-object replacement when a
   cache is under extreme pressure and in danger of thrashing.  In
   addition, since the forwarder remembers the QoS treatment for each
   pending Interest in its PIT, the above cache controls can be
   augmented by policy to prefer retention of cached content for some
   equivalence classes as part of the cache replacement algorithm.

      |  Note: With hard partitioning, there are dedicated cache
      |  resources for each equivalence class (or enumerated list of
      |  equivalence classes).  With soft partitioning, resources are at
      |  least partly shared among the (sets of) equivalence classes of
      |  traffic.

7.  Strawman Principles for an ICN QoS Architecture

   Based on the observations made in the earlier sections, this summary
   section captures the author's ideas for clear and actionable
   architectural principles for incorporating QoS machinery into ICN
   protocols like NDN and CCNx.  Hopefully, they can guide further work
   and focus effort on portions of the giant design space for QoS that
   have the best trade-offs in terms of flexibility, simplicity, and
   deployability.

   *Define equivalence classes using the name hierarchy rather than
   creating an independent traffic class definition*. This directly
   associates the specification of equivalence classes of traffic with
   the structure of the application namespace.  It can allow
   hierarchical decomposition of equivalence classes in a natural way
   because of the way hierarchical ICN names are constructed.  Two
   practical mechanisms are presented in [FLOWCLASS] with different
   trade-offs between security and the ability to aggregate flows.
   Either the prefix-based mechanism (the equivalence class component
   count (EC3) scheme) or the explicit name component-based mechanism
   (the equivalence class name component type (ECNCT) scheme), or both,
   could be adopted as the part of the QoS architecture for defining
   equivalence classes.

   *Put consumers in control of link and forwarding resource
   allocation*. Base all link buffering and forwarding (both memory and
   CPU) resource allocations on Interest arrivals.  This is attractive
   because it provides early congestion feedback to consumers and allows
   scheduling the reverse link direction for carrying the matching data
   in advance.  It makes enforcement of QoS treatments a single-ended
   (i.e., at the consumer) rather than a double-ended problem and can
   avoid wasting resources on fetching data that will be dropped when it
   arrives at a bottleneck link.

   *Allow producers to influence the allocation of cache resources*.
   Producers want to affect caching decisions in order to do the
   following:

   *  Shed load by having Interests served by CSes in forwarders before
      they reach the producer itself

   *  Survive transient producer reachability or link outages close to
      the producer

   For caching to be effective, individual Data objects in an
   equivalence class need to have similar treatment; otherwise, well-
   known cache-thrashing pathologies due to self-interference emerge.
   Producers have the most direct control over caching policies through
   the caching directives in Data messages.  It therefore makes sense to
   put the producer, rather than the consumer or network operator, in
   charge of specifying these equivalence classes.

   See [FLOWCLASS] for specific mechanisms to achieve this.

   *Allow consumers to influence the allocation of cache resources*.
   Consumers want to affect caching decisions in order to do the
   following:

   *  Reduce latency for retrieving data

   *  Survive transient outages of either a producer or links close to
      the consumer

   Consumers can have indirect control over caching by specifying QoS
   treatments in their Interests.  Consider the following potential QoS
   treatments by consumers that can drive caching policies:

   *  A QoS treatment requesting better robustness against transient
      disconnection can be used by a forwarder close to the consumer (or
      downstream of an unreliable link) to preferentially cache the
      corresponding data.

   *  Conversely, a QoS treatment together with, or in addition to, a
      request for short latency indicating that the forwarder should
      only pay attention to the caching preferences of the producer
      because caching requested data would be ineffective (i.e., new
      data will be requested shortly).

   *  A QoS treatment indicating that a mobile consumer will likely
      incur a mobility event within an RTT (or a few RTTs).  Such a
      treatment would allow a mobile network operator to preferentially
      cache the data at a forwarder positioned at a _join point_ or
      _rendezvous point_ of their topology.

   *Give network operators the ability to match customer SLAs to cache
   resource availability*. Network operators, whether closely tied
   administratively to producer or consumer, or constituting an
   independent transit administration, provide the storage resources in
   the ICN forwarders.  Therefore, they are the ultimate arbiters of how
   the cache resources are managed.  In addition to any local policies
   they may enforce, the cache behavior from the QoS standpoint emerges
   from the mapping of producer-specified equivalence classes onto cache
   space availability, including whether cache entries are treated
   individually or fate-shared.  Forwarders also determine the mapping
   of consumer-specified QoS treatments to the precedence used for
   retaining Data objects in the cache.

   Besides utilizing cache resources to meet the QoS goals of individual
   producers and consumers, network operators also want to manage their
   cache resources in order to do the following:

   *  Ameliorate congestion hotspots by reducing load converging on
      producers they host on their network

   *  Improve Interest satisfaction rates by utilizing caches as short-
      term retransmission buffers to recover from transient producer
      reachability problems, link errors, or link outages

   *  Improve both latency and reliability in environments when
      consumers are mobile in the operator's topology

   *Rethink how to specify traffic treatments -- don't just copy
   Diffserv*. Some of the Diffserv classes may form a good starting
   point, as their mappings onto queuing algorithms for managing link
   buffering are well understood.  However, Diffserv alone does not
   capture more complex QoS treatments, such as:

   *  Trading off latency against reliability

   *  Trading off resource usage against delivery probability through
      controlled flooding or other forwarding mechanisms

   *  Allocating resources based on rich TSPEC-like traffic descriptions
      that appear in signaled QoS schemes like Intserv

   Here are some examples:

   *  A "burst" treatment, where an initial Interest gives an aggregate
      data size to request allocation of link capacity for a large burst
      of Interest/Data exchanges.  The Interest can be rejected at any
      hop if the resources are not available.  Such a treatment can also
      accommodate Data implosion produced by the discovery procedures of
      management protocols like [CCNINFO].

   *  A "reliable" treatment, which affects preference for allocation of
      PIT space for the Interest and CS space for the Data in order to
      improve the robustness of IoT data delivery in a constrained
      environment, as is described in [IOTQOS].

   *  A "search" treatment, which, within the specified Interest
      Lifetime, tries many paths either in parallel or serially to
      potentially many content sources, to maximize the probability that
      the requested item will be found.  This is done at the expense of
      the extra bandwidth of both forwarding Interests and receiving
      multiple responses upstream of an aggregation point.  The
      treatment can encode a value expressing trade-offs like breadth-
      first versus depth-first search, and bounds on the total resource
      expenditure.  Such a treatment would be useful for instrumentation
      protocols like [ICNTRACEROUTE].

      |  As an aside, loose latency control (on the order of seconds or
      |  tens of milliseconds as opposed milliseconds or microseconds)
      |  can be achieved by bounding Interest Lifetime as long as this
      |  lifetime machinery is not also used as an application mechanism
      |  to provide subscriptions or to establish path traces for
      |  producer mobility.  See [Krol2018] for a discussion of the
      |  network versus application timescale issues in ICN protocols.

7.1.  Can Intserv-Like Traffic Control in ICN Provide Richer QoS
      Semantics?

   Basic QoS treatments such as those summarized above may not be
   adequate to cover the whole range of application utility functions
   and deployment environments we expect for ICN.  While it is true that
   one does not necessarily need a separate signaling protocol like RSVP
   given the state carried in the ICN data plane by forwarders, simple
   QoS treatments applied per Interest/Data exchanges lack some
   potentially important capabilities.  Intserv's richer QoS
   capabilities may be of value, especially if they can be provided in
   ICN at lower complexity and protocol overhead than Intserv plus RSVP.

   There are three key capabilities missing from Diffserv-like QoS
   treatments, no matter how sophisticated they may be in describing the
   desired treatment for a given equivalence class of traffic.  Intserv-
   like QoS provides all of these:

   1.  The ability to *describe traffic flows* in a mathematically
       meaningful way.  This is done through parameters like average
       rate, peak rate, and maximum burst size.  The parameters are
       encapsulated in a data structure called a "TSPEC", which can be
       placed in whatever protocol needs the information (in the case of
       TCP/IP Intserv, this is RSVP).

   2.  The ability to perform *admission control*, where the element
       requesting the QoS treatment can know _before_ introducing
       traffic whether the network elements have agreed to provide the
       requested traffic treatment.  An important side effect of
       providing this assurance is that the network elements install
       state that allows the forwarding and queuing machinery to police
       and shape the traffic in a way that provides a sufficient degree
       of _isolation_ from the dynamic behavior of other traffic.
       Depending on the admission-control mechanism, it may or may not
       be possible to explicitly release that state when the application
       no longer needs the QoS treatment.

   3.  The ability to specify the permissible *degree of divergence* in
       the actual traffic handling from the requested handling.  Intserv
       provides two choices here: the _controlled load_ service and the
       _guaranteed_ service.  The former allows stochastic deviation
       equivalent to what one would experience on an unloaded path of a
       packet network.  The latter conforms to the TSPEC
       deterministically, at the obvious expense of demanding extremely
       conservative resource allocation.

   Given the limited applicability of these capabilities in today's
   Internet, the author does not take any position as to whether any of
   these Intserv-like capabilities are needed for ICN to be successful.
   However, a few things seem important to consider.  The following
   paragraphs speculate about the consequences of incorporating these
   features into the CCNx or NDN protocol architectures.

   Superficially, it would be quite straightforward to accommodate
   Intserv-equivalent traffic descriptions in CCNx or NDN.  One could
   define a new TLV for the Interest message to carry a TSPEC.  A
   forwarder encountering this, together with a QoS treatment request
   (e.g., as proposed in Section 6.3), could associate the traffic
   specification with the corresponding equivalence class derived from
   the name in the Interest.  This would allow the forwarder to create
   state that not only would apply to the returning Data for that
   Interest when being queued on the downstream interface but also be
   maintained as soft state across multiple Interest/Data exchanges to
   drive policing and shaping algorithms at per-flow granularity.  The
   cost in Interest message overhead would be modest; however, the
   complications associated with managing different traffic
   specifications in different Interests for the same equivalence class
   might be substantial.  Of course, all the scalability considerations
   with maintaining per-flow state also come into play.

   Similarly, it would be equally straightforward to have a way to
   express the degree of divergence capability that Intserv provides
   through its controlled load and guaranteed service definitions.  This
   could either be packaged with the traffic specification or encoded
   separately.

   In contrast to the above, performing admission control for ICN flows
   is likely to be just as heavyweight as it is with IP using RSVP.  The
   dynamic multipath, multi-destination forwarding model of ICN makes
   performing admission control particularly tricky.  Just to
   illustrate:

   *  Forwarding next-hop selection is not confined to single paths (or
      a few ECMP equivalent paths) as it is with IP, making it difficult
      to know where to install state in advance of the arrival of an
      Interest to forward.

   *  As with point-to-multipoint complexities when using RSVP for MPLS-
      TE, state has to be installed to multiple producers over multiple
      paths before an admission-control algorithm can commit the
      resources and say "yes" to a consumer needing admission-control
      capabilities.

   *  Knowing when to remove admission-control state is difficult in the
      absence of a heavyweight resource reservation protocol.  Soft
      state timeout may or may not be an adequate answer.

   Despite the challenges above, it may be possible to craft an
   admission-control scheme for ICN that achieves the desired QoS goals
   of applications without the invention and deployment of a complex,
   separate admission-control signaling protocol.  There have been
   designs in earlier network architectures that were capable of
   performing admission control piggybacked on packet transmission.

      |  The earliest example the author is aware of is [Autonet].

   Such a scheme might have the following general shape (*warning:*
   serious hand-waving follows!):

   *  In addition to a QoS treatment and a traffic specification, an
      Interest requesting admission for the corresponding equivalence
      class would indicate this via a new TLV.  It would also need to do
      the following: (a) indicate an expiration time after which any
      reserved resources can be released, and (b) indicate that caches
      be bypassed, so that the admission-control request arrives at a
      bona fide producer.

   *  Each forwarder processing the Interest would check for resource
      availability.  If the resources are not available, or the
      requested service is not feasible, the forwarder would reject the
      Interest with an admission-control failure.  If resources are
      available, the forwarder would record the traffic specification as
      described above and forward the Interest.

   *  If the Interest successfully arrives at a producer, the producer
      would return the requested Data.

   *  Upon receiving the matching Data message and if the resources are
      still available, each on-path forwarder would allocate resources
      and would mark the admission control TLV as "provisionally
      approved".  Conversely, if the resource reservation fails, the
      admission control would be marked "failed", although the Data
      would still be passed downstream.

   *  Upon the Data message arrival, the consumer would know if
      admission succeeded or not, and subsequent Interests could rely on
      the QoS state being in place until either some failure occurs, or
      a topology or other forwarding change alters the forwarding path.
      To deal with this, additional machinery is needed to ensure
      subsequent Interests for an admitted flow either follow that path
      or an error is reported.  One possibility (also useful in many
      other contexts), is to employ a _Path Steering_ mechanism, such as
      the one described in [Moiseenko2017].

8.  IANA Considerations

   This document has no IANA actions.

9.  Security Considerations

   There are a few ways in which QoS for ICN interacts with security and
   privacy issues.  Since QoS addresses relationships among traffic
   rather than the inherent characteristics of traffic, it neither
   enhances nor degrades the security and privacy properties of the data
   being carried, as long as the machinery does not alter or otherwise
   compromise the basic security properties of the associated protocols.
   The QoS approaches advocated here for ICN can serve to amplify
   existing threats to network traffic.  However:

   *  An attacker able to manipulate the QoS treatments of traffic can
      mount a more focused (and potentially more effective) denial-of-
      service attack by suppressing performance on traffic the attacker
      is targeting.  Since the architecture here assumes QoS treatments
      are manipulatable hop-by-hop, any on-path adversary can wreak
      havoc.  Note, however, that in basic ICN, an on-path attacker can
      do this and more by dropping, delaying, or misrouting traffic
      independent of any particular QoS machinery in use.

   *  When equivalence classes of traffic are explicitly revealed via
      either names or other fields in packets, an attacker has yet one
      more handle to use to discover linkability of multiple requests.

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

   [RFC8569]  Mosko, M., Solis, I., and C. Wood, "Content-Centric
              Networking (CCNx) Semantics", RFC 8569,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8569, July 2019,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8569>.

   [RFC8609]  Mosko, M., Solis, I., and C. Wood, "Content-Centric
              Networking (CCNx) Messages in TLV Format", RFC 8609,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8609, July 2019,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8609>.

10.2.  Informative References

   [AS]       Wikipedia, "Autonomous system (Internet)", May 2021,
              <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Autonomous_sys
              tem_(Internet)&oldid=1025244754>.

   [Auge2018] Augé, J., Carofiglio, G., Grassi, G., Muscariello, L.,
              Pau, G., and X. Zeng, "MAP-Me: Managing Anchor-Less
              Producer Mobility in Content-Centric Networks", in IEEE
              Transactions on Network and Service Management, Vol. 15,
              No. 2, DOI 10.1109/TNSM.2018.2796720, June 2018,
              <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8267132>.

   [Autonet]  Schroeder, M., Birrell, A., Burrows, M., Murray, H.,
              Needham, R., Rodeheffer, T., Satterthwaite, E., and C.
              Thacker, "Autonet: a High-speed, Self-configuring Local
              Area Network Using Point-to-point Links", in IEEE Journal
              on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 9, No. 8,
              DOI 10.1109/49.105178, October 1991,
              <https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-
              59.pdf>.

   [BenAbraham2018]
              Ben Abraham, H., Parwatikar, J., DeHart, J., Dresher, A.,
              and P. Crowley, "Decoupling Information and Connectivity
              via Information-Centric Transport", in ICN '18:
              Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Information-
              Centric Networking, Boston, MA, USA,
              DOI 10.1145/3267955.3267963, September 2018,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2018/proceedings/
              icn18-final31.pdf>.

   [Carofiglio2012]
              Carofiglio, G., Gallo, M., and L. Muscariello, "Joint Hop-
              by-hop and Receiver-Driven Interest Control Protocol for
              Content-Centric Networks", in ACM SIGCOMM Computer
              Communication Review, DOI 10.1145/2377677.2377772,
              September 2012,
              <http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2012/paper/icn/
              p37.pdf>.

   [Carofiglio2016]
              Carofiglio, G., Gallo, M., and L. Muscariello, "Optimal
              multipath congestion control and request forwarding in
              information-centric networks: Protocol design and
              experimentation", in Computer Networks, Vol. 110,
              DOI 10.1016/j.comnet.2016.09.012, December 2016,
              <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2016.09.012>.

   [CCNINFO]  Asaeda, H., Ooka, A., and X. Shao, "CCNinfo: Discovering
              Content and Network Information in Content-Centric
              Networks", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-irtf-
              icnrg-ccninfo-06, 9 March 2021,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-irtf-icnrg-
              ccninfo-06>.

   [DNC-QOS-ICN]
              Jangam, A., Ed., Suthar, P., and M. Stolic, "QoS
              Treatments in ICN using Disaggregated Name Components",
              Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-anilj-icnrg-dnc-
              qos-icn-02, 9 March 2020,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-anilj-icnrg-
              dnc-qos-icn-02>.

   [FLOWBALANCE]
              Oran, D., "Maintaining CCNx or NDN flow balance with
              highly variable data object sizes", Work in Progress,
              Internet-Draft, draft-oran-icnrg-flowbalance-05, 14
              February 2021, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/
              draft-oran-icnrg-flowbalance-05>.

   [FLOWCLASS]
              Moiseenko, I. and D. Oran, "Flow Classification in
              Information Centric Networking", Work in Progress,
              Internet-Draft, draft-moiseenko-icnrg-flowclass-07, 13
              January 2021, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/
              draft-moiseenko-icnrg-flowclass-07>.

   [HICN]     Muscariello, L., Carofiglio, G., Augé, J., Papalini, M.,
              and M. Sardara, "Hybrid Information-Centric Networking",
              Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-muscariello-
              intarea-hicn-04, 20 May 2020,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-muscariello-
              intarea-hicn-04>.

   [ICNTRACEROUTE]
              Mastorakis, S., Gibson, J., Moiseenko, I., Droms, R., and
              D. R. Oran, "ICN Traceroute Protocol Specification", Work
              in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-irtf-icnrg-
              icntraceroute-02, 11 April 2021,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-irtf-icnrg-
              icntraceroute-02>.

   [IOTQOS]   Gundogan, C., Schmidt, T. C., Waehlisch, M., Frey, M.,
              Shzu-Juraschek, F., and J. Pfender, "Quality of Service
              for ICN in the IoT", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft,
              draft-gundogan-icnrg-iotqos-01, 8 July 2019,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-gundogan-
              icnrg-iotqos-01>.

   [Krol2018] Król, M., Habak, K., Oran, D., Kutscher, D., and I.
              Psaras, "RICE: Remote Method Invocation in ICN", in ICN
              '18: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Information-
              Centric Networking, Boston, MA, USA,
              DOI 10.1145/3267955.3267956, September 2018,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2018/proceedings/
              icn18-final9.pdf>.

   [Mahdian2016]
              Mahdian, M., Arianfar, S., Gibson, J., and D. Oran,
              "MIRCC: Multipath-aware ICN Rate-based Congestion
              Control", in ACM-ICN '16: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM
              Conference on Information-Centric Networking,
              DOI 10.1145/2984356.2984365, September 2016,
              <http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2016/proceedings/
              p1-mahdian.pdf>.

   [minmaxfairness]
              Wikipedia, "Max-min fairness", June 2021,
              <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Max-
              min_fairness&oldid=1028246910>.

   [Moiseenko2017]
              Moiseenko, I. and D. Oran, "Path Switching in Content
              Centric and Named Data Networks", in ICN '17: Proceedings
              of the 4th ACM Conference on Information-Centric
              Networking, DOI 10.1145/3125719.3125721, September 2017,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2017/proceedings/
              icn17-2.pdf>.

   [NDN]      "Named Data Networking: Executive Summary",
              <https://named-data.net/project/execsummary/>.

   [NDNTutorials]
              "NDN Tutorials",
              <https://named-data.net/publications/tutorials/>.

   [NWC-CCN-REQS]
              Matsuzono, K., Asaeda, H., and C. Westphal, "Network
              Coding for Content-Centric Networking / Named Data
              Networking: Considerations and Challenges", Work in
              Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-irtf-nwcrg-nwc-ccn-reqs-
              05, 22 January 2021,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-irtf-nwcrg-
              nwc-ccn-reqs-05>.

   [Oran2018QoSslides]
              Oran, D., "Thoughts on Quality of Service for NDN/CCN-
              style ICN protocol architectures", presented at ICNRG
              Interim Meeting, Cambridge, MA, 24 September 2018,
              <https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/interim-2018-icnrg-
              03/materials/slides-interim-2018-icnrg-03-sessa-thoughts-
              on-qos-for-ndnccn-style-icn-protocol-architectures>.

   [proportionalfairness]
              Wikipedia, "Proportional-fair scheduling", June 2021,
              <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proportional-
              fair_scheduling&oldid=1027073289>.

   [RFC0793]  Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
              RFC 793, DOI 10.17487/RFC0793, September 1981,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc793>.

   [RFC2205]  Braden, R., Ed., Zhang, L., Berson, S., Herzog, S., and S.
              Jamin, "Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) -- Version 1
              Functional Specification", RFC 2205, DOI 10.17487/RFC2205,
              September 1997, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2205>.

   [RFC2474]  Nichols, K., Blake, S., Baker, F., and D. Black,
              "Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS
              Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers", RFC 2474,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2474, December 1998,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2474>.

   [RFC2998]  Bernet, Y., Ford, P., Yavatkar, R., Baker, F., Zhang, L.,
              Speer, M., Braden, R., Davie, B., Wroclawski, J., and E.
              Felstaine, "A Framework for Integrated Services Operation
              over Diffserv Networks", RFC 2998, DOI 10.17487/RFC2998,
              November 2000, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2998>.

   [RFC3170]  Quinn, B. and K. Almeroth, "IP Multicast Applications:
              Challenges and Solutions", RFC 3170, DOI 10.17487/RFC3170,
              September 2001, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3170>.

   [RFC3209]  Awduche, D., Berger, L., Gan, D., Li, T., Srinivasan, V.,
              and G. Swallow, "RSVP-TE: Extensions to RSVP for LSP
              Tunnels", RFC 3209, DOI 10.17487/RFC3209, December 2001,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3209>.

   [RFC4340]  Kohler, E., Handley, M., and S. Floyd, "Datagram
              Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)", RFC 4340,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC4340, March 2006,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4340>.

   [RFC4594]  Babiarz, J., Chan, K., and F. Baker, "Configuration
              Guidelines for DiffServ Service Classes", RFC 4594,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC4594, August 2006,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4594>.

   [RFC4960]  Stewart, R., Ed., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
              RFC 4960, DOI 10.17487/RFC4960, September 2007,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4960>.

   [RFC9000]  Iyengar, J., Ed. and M. Thomson, Ed., "QUIC: A UDP-Based
              Multiplexed and Secure Transport", RFC 9000,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC9000, May 2021,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9000>.

   [Schneider2016]
              Schneider, K., Yi, C., Zhang, B., and L. Zhang, "A
              Practical Congestion Control Scheme for Named Data
              Networking", in ACM-ICN '16: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM
              Conference on Information-Centric Networking,
              DOI 10.1145/2984356.2984369, September 2016,
              <http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2016/proceedings/
              p21-schneider.pdf>.

   [Shenker2006]
              Shenker, S., "Fundamental design issues for the future
              Internet", in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
              Communications, Vol. 13, No. 7, DOI 10.1109/49.414637,
              September 2006,
              <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/49.414637>.

   [Song2018] Song, J., Lee, M., and T. Kwon, "SMIC: Subflow-level
              Multi-path Interest Control for Information Centric
              Networking", ICN '18: Proceedings of the 5th ACM
              Conference on Information-Centric Networking,
              DOI 10.1145/3267955.3267971, September 2018,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2018/proceedings/
              icn18-final62.pdf>.

   [Tseng2003]
              Tseng, C.-J. and C.-H. Chen, "The performance of QoS-aware
              IP multicast routing protocols", in Networks, Vol. 42,
              DOI 10.1002/net.10084, September 2003,
              <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/
              net.10084>.

   [Wang2000] Wang, B. and J. C. Hou, "Multicast routing and its QoS
              extension: problems, algorithms, and protocols", in IEEE
              Network, Vol. 14, Issue 1, DOI 10.1109/65.819168, January
              2000, <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/819168>.

   [Wang2013] Wang, Y., Rozhnova, N., Narayanan, A., Oran, D., and I.
              Rhee, "An improved Hop-by-hop Interest Shaper for
              Congestion Control in Named Data Networking", in ACM
              SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review,
              DOI 10.1145/2534169.2491233, August 2013,
              <https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/icn/
              p55.pdf>.

Author's Address

   Dave Oran
   Network Systems Research and Design
   4 Shady Hill Square
   Cambridge, MA 02138
   United States of America

   Email: daveoran@orandom.net