Subject: [MEXT] round-robin action for flow binding rules

From: Julien Laganier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 14:55:17 +0200

Folks,

One of my colleague has suggested the idea of adding a round-robin 
action to a rule in addition to the existing ones:

>       1 Forward.  This value indicates a request to forward a flow to
>       the address indicated in the Binding Reference sub-option.  A
>       single BID MUST be associated with this Action.
>
>       2 Discard.  This value indicates a request to discard all
>       packets in the flow described by the option.  No BIDs are
>       associated with this Action.
>
>       3 n-cast.  This value indicates a request to replicate the flow
>       to several addresses indicated in the Binding Reference
>       sub-option. One or more BIDs MUST be associated with this
>       Action. 

        4 round-robin.  This value indicates a request to forward 
        packets from a flow in a round-robin fashion to several
        addresses indicated in the Binding Reference sub-option. One or
        more BIDs MUST be associated with this Action. 

This could be used to load balance some type of traffics amongst two 
different links.

What do you think?

--julien

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From: Hesham Soliman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 May 2009 23:03:44 +1000

Hi Julien,

> This could be used to load balance some type of traffics amongst two

=> This was actually in an older version and we removed it due to the dnager
of load balancing on a per-packet basis. I have pretty strong opnions
against this because it breaks TCP or any secure traffic where sequence
numbers are used for replay attacks. And in many cases there is not enough
information at the MIP level alone or in upper layers alone to make this
decision. Per-packet balancing can be very bad in many cases. There are
extremely limited scenarios (can't think of any) where this adds value. I
don't think we know enough to add this at this stage. Perhaps later when
work on multi-path TCP becomes a reality this action can be added in an
extension RFC. 

Hesham

> 
> --julien
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> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mext

---

From: Michael Eriksson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 08:29:57 +0200

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 23:03:44 +1000, Hesham Soliman wrote:
> > [...]

One interresting case for "per-packet" round-robin transmission is an
RTP media flow (say HD TV) that doesn't fit on any of the available
accesses.

Regards,
Michael