[changing the title to the real draft being discussed]

Hi Stewart,
Please see inline [Bruno]



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From: Stewart Bryant <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 4, 2023 1:35 PM
To: Gyan Mishra <[email protected]>
Cc: Stewart Bryant <[email protected]>; Alexander Vainshtein 
<[email protected]>; [email protected]; rtgwg-chairs 
<[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] draft-ietf-rtgwg-segment-routing-ti-lfa : A simple 
pathological network fragment


I looked at draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop again and it appears to 
be proposing  RFC 5715 Section 6.3 far side tunnelling with the constraint that 
the path into Q space is congruent with the post convergence path.

[Bruno] Yes. draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop is:

  *   RFC 5715 Section 6.3 far side tunnelling
  *   Using SR to reach the "far side". (while RFC5715 did not really had a 
solution for this problem, while of the difficulty is to reach this far side)
  *   Along the path that the IGP has computed (aka post-convergence path)


What draft-bashandy does not emphasis clearly enough in my opinion is that 
EVERY ingress that might be carrying traffic over the failure MUST take part in 
this process.

[Bruno] Not certain what you mean:

  *   Having a single node P1 supporting draft-bashandy is enough to avoid 
micro-loops from P1 up to all its destinations. So I'm not sure I would call it 
a MUST as per RFC2119
  *   If you want to protect all traffic from all micro-loops, you need all 
nodes to support draft-bashandy. But deployment can be incremental with 
incremental benefit

A further thing to note is that it is actually quite difficult to compute the 
post convergence path
[Bruno] That part is actually extremely simple: it's a simple SPF and this is 
the SPF already done by the IGP for its normal operation.
What is more difficult is to compute the SR Policies to avoid micro-loops until 
you reach the Q space. There may be multiple algorithms and different vendors 
may have chosen different ones. It's mostly a local issue but ideally the 
network operator would like to know the objectives of the implementation as 
there are typically trade-offs. Ideally, we would want:

  *   Handle any transition from graph1 to graph2 (link failure is relatively 
trivial, node failure a bit less, SRLG (any set of link failures) failures a 
bit less)
  *   Handle any number of consecutives/overlapping IGP convergences (from 
graph1 to graph2 ... to graph N)
  *   Fast computations (compared to TI-LFA, those computations are performed 
after the failure to computation time delay the IGP convergence time)
  *   Minimize the number of SIDs (e.g. MPLS labels)
Depending on your implementation/market you may want to optimize for a 
different thing..


because to do so you need to determine the decision that every node along the 
path will take and you cannot do that with 100% certainty because you cannot be 
sure which of the available next hops it will consider using and even if that 
is not an issue you cannot anticipate the ECMP decision that it will take as 
that may well be different depending on the MPLS label stack (which will be 
different in the case of draft-bashandy compared to native transit). Now of 
course this will not affect the loop free convergence process if this is wrong, 
but that takes me to the point in the next paragraph.
[Bruno] I'm not sure what you mean by "wrong". We compute and enforce the 
shortest IP path. If there are ECMP, they are used. Among the ECMPs, the 
specific path used by a specific flow is not control by the router doing the 
SPF computation. With or without draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop. 
Due to the extra SR segments/labels, the path of a given flow may be different 
with a without draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop. But in any case, the 
aggregate traffic is load balanced across all paths

Rather than do the complicated congruence calculation, a very good 
approximation (and compatible approach) would be to tunnel the traffic into Q 
space WRT the failure using one or two labels as needed (what draft-bashandy 
does but without the attempt at the strict constraint constraint).
[Bruno] The congruence calculation is not complicated. That the usual IGP SPF. 
What's harder is to compute the SR policies to enforce the loopfree path, and 
you would need this in all cases to safely rech the Q space.
You are referring to 1 or 2 labels, but this is only applicable for a small 
subset (link failures). In the general case, anyone (post convergence path or 
not) may need more than 2 labels

Of course if a node chooses to perform the complex calculation to find path 
congruence it may do so, but this approximate approach will work just as well 
and interoperably with nodes that chose a simpler approach.  If an  ingress 
node choses to use nearside tunnelling as far as I can see this would be a 
perfectly viable alternative and would be compatible with nodes choosing the 
approach in draft-bashandy.
[Bruno] I should probably refrain from side tracking to nearside tunnelling... 
But note that in essence, one could see 
draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop as Nearside Tunneling with using SR 
"tunnels" as tunnels. (note that we usually avoid using the term "tunnels" for 
SR). But we do specific computations to only use Segments (tunnels) which are 
not impacted by loops (IOW segments whose paths is not affected)

Now I note that draft-bashandy requires a conservative estimate of the 
convergence time of the slowest router along the path. That value will change 
over time (possibly faster possibly slower) as the network evolves, and thought 
should be given to the protocol work that we started in RTGWG to advertising 
this parameter some years ago (draft-ietf-rtgwg-routing-timer-param-sync).
[Bruno] yes it uses a timer value. IMHO the exact value is not that important 
for draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop because before and after this 
timer, all traffic is using the same path (the IGP shortest path). So the only 
"cost" are the extra labels being pushed (for SR-MPLS) To me, we don't really 
need to signal it, but yes, one may want to advertise and use it. (using it 
would requires that all nodes support the advertisement)

So I as far as I can see the requirement in the TiLFA draft needs to be that a 
network MUST deploy a loop-free convergence strategy.
[Bruno] Not it's not a must. There may be a misunderstanding that I will try to 
cover in a different thread.

That strategy can be any of the RFC 5715 strategies.
[Bruno] yes. (But in a SR network, I would argue that 
draft-bashandy-rtgwg-segment-routing-uloop is the best solution. And if you 
have deployed TI-LFA, you are guaranteed to have SR available.
But let's avoid the discussion about preferences)

--Bruno

If the PLR can be sure that the whole network is using one of the tunnel 
approaches that is fine, but we should note that an individual ingress router 
may chose either the nearside or the far side approach using any topology that 
safely delivers the packet into Q space WRT the failure. If the PLR cannot be 
sure that the whole network supports a tunnel based approach it may 
independently finesse this by using the incremental link cost approach.

- Stewart







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