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NAME

       sfb - Stochastic Fair Blue

SYNOPSIS

       tc  qdisc  ...  blue  rehash milliseconds db milliseconds limit packets max packets target
       packets increment float decrement float  penalty_rate  packets  per  second  penalty_burst
       packets

DESCRIPTION

       Stochastic  Fair  Blue  is a classless qdisc to manage congestion based on packet loss and
       link utilization history while trying to prevent non-responsive flows (i.e. flows that  do
       not  react  to  congestion  marking  or  dropped  packets)  from  impacting performance of
       responsive flows.  Unlike RED, where the marking probability has to  be  configured,  BLUE
       tries to determine the ideal marking probability automatically.

ALGORITHM

       The  BLUE algorithm maintains a probability which is used to mark or drop packets that are
       to be queued. If the queue overflows, the mark/drop probability is increased. If the queue
       becomes  empty,  the probability is decreased. The Stochastic Fair Blue (SFB) algorithm is
       designed to protect TCP flows against non-responsive flows.

       This SFB implementation maintains 8 levels of 16 bins each for accounting.  Each  flow  is
       mapped into a bin of each level using a per-level hash value.

       Every  bin maintains a marking probability, which gets increased or decreased based on bin
       occupancy. If the number of packets exceeds the size of that bin, the marking  probability
       is increased. If the number drops to zero, it is decreased.

       The  marking  probability is based on the minimum value of all bins a flow is mapped into,
       thus, when a flow does not respond  to  marking  or  gradual  packet  drops,  the  marking
       probability quickly reaches one.

       In this case, the flow is rate-limited to penalty_rate packets per second.

LIMITATIONS

       Due  to  SFBs  nature, it is possible for responsive flows to share all of its bins with a
       non-responsive flow, causing the  responsive  flow  to  be  misidentified  as  being  non-
       responsive.

       The  probability  of  a  responsive flow to be misidentified is dependent on the number of
       non-responsive flows, M. It is (1 - (1 - (1 / 16.0)) ** M) **8, so  for  example  with  10
       non-responsive flows approximately 0.2% of responsive flows will be misidentified.

       To mitigate this, SFB performs performs periodic re-hashing to avoid misclassification for
       prolonged periods of time.

       The default hashing method will use source and destination ip addresses and  port  numbers
       if possible, and also supports tunneling protocols.  Alternatively, an external classifier
       can be configured, too.

PARAMETERS

       rehash Time interval in milliseconds when queue perturbation occurs to  avoid  erroneously
              detecting  unrelated,  responsive  flows as being part of a non-responsive flow for
              prolonged periods of time.  Defaults to 10 minutes.

       db     Double buffering warmup wait  time,  in  milliseconds.   To  avoid  destroying  the
              probability  history  when  rehashing is performed, this implementation maintains a
              second set of levels/bins as described in section 4.4 of the SFB reference.   While
              one  set is used to manage the queue, a second set is warmed up: Whenever a flow is
              then determined to be non-responsive, the marking probabilities in the  second  set
              are  updated.  When  the  rehashing  happens, these bins will be used to manage the
              queue and all non-responsive flows can be  rate-limited  immediately.   This  value
              determines how much time has to pass before the 2nd set will start to be warmed up.
              Defaults to one minute, should be lower than rehash.

       limit  Hard limit on the real (not average) total queue size in packets.  Further  packets
              are  dropped.  Defaults  to  the  transmit  queue length of the device the qdisc is
              attached to.

       max    Maximum length of a buckets queue, in packets, before packets start being  dropped.
              Should  be  slightly larger than target , but should not be set to values exceeding
              1.5 times that of target .  Defaults to 25.

       target The desired average bin length. If the bin queue length  reaches  this  value,  the
              marking  probability  is  increased by increment.  The default value depends on the
              max setting, with max set to 25 target will default to 20.

       increment
              A value used to increase the marking probability when the queue appears to be over-
              used. Must be between 0 and 1.0. Defaults to 0.00050.

       decrement
              Value used to decrease the marking probability when the queue is found to be empty.
              Must be between 0 and 1.0.  Defaults to 0.00005.

       penalty_rate
              The maximum number of packets belonging to flows identified as being non-responsive
              that can be enqueued per second. Once this number has been reached, further packets
              of such non-responsive flows are dropped.  Set this to  a  reasonable  fraction  of
              your uplink throughput; the default value of 10 packets is probably too small.

       penalty_burst
              The number of packets a flow is permitted to exceed the penalty rate before packets
              start being dropped.  Defaults to 20 packets.

STATISTICS

       This qdisc exposes additional statistics via 'tc -s qdisc' output.  These are:

       earlydrop
              The number of packets dropped before a per-flow queue was full.

       ratedrop
              The number of packets dropped because of rate-limiting.  If  this  value  is  high,
              there  are  many non-reactive flows being sent through sfb. In such cases, it might
              be better to embed sfb within a classful qdisc to better control such flows using a
              different, shaping qdisc.

       bucketdrop
              The  number  of packets dropped because a per-flow queue was full.  High bucketdrop
              may point to a high number of aggressive, short-lived flows.

       queuedrop
              The number of packets dropped due to reaching limit. This should normally be 0.

       marked The number of packets marked with ECN.

       maxqlen
              The length of the current longest per-flow (virtual) queue.

       maxprob
              The maximum per-flow drop probability. 1 means that some flows have  been  detected
              as non-reactive.

NOTES

       SFB  automatically  enables use of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).  Also, this SFB
       implementation does not queue packets itself.  Rather, packets are enqueued to  the  inner
       qdisc  (defaults  to  pfifo).  Because sfb maintains virtual queue states, the inner qdisc
       must not drop a packet previously queued.  Furthermore, if a buckets queue has a very high
       marking  rate, this implementation will start dropping packets instead of marking them, as
       such a situation points to either bad congestion, or an unresponsive flow.

EXAMPLE & USAGE

       To attach to interface $DEV, using default options:

       # tc qdisc add dev $DEV handle 1: root sfb

       Only use destination ip addresses for assigning packets to bins, perturbing  hash  results
       every 10 minutes:

       # tc filter add dev $DEV parent 1: handle 1 flow hash keys dst perturb 600

SEE ALSO

       tc(8), tc-red(8), tc-sfq(8)

SOURCES

       o      W. Feng, D. Kandlur, D. Saha, K. Shin, BLUE: A New Class of Active Queue Management
              Algorithms, U. Michigan CSE-TR-387-99, April 1999.

AUTHORS

       This SFB implementation was contributed by Juliusz Chroboczek and Eric Dumazet.