Pre-Congestion Notification Using Packet-Specific Dual Marking

Pre-congestion notification (PCN) uses packet metering and marking within a PCN domain to notify PCN egress nodes about high load regimes in the network. One question is how to encode the PCN markings in packet headers. The problem is that the IPv4 packet header is short of available codepoints and that tunnelling mechanisms constrain solutions. This paper proposes packet-specific dual marking (PSDM) as a new encoding scheme that avoids these problems and also explains how to apply it to achieve PCN-based admission control and flow termination. Therefore, our proposal may improve the deployability of PCN in spite of the limited extensibility of the current Internet architecture.