Explicit Congestion Notification

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is an extension to the and to the and is defined in RFC 3168 (2001). ECN allows end-to-end notification of network congestion without dropping packets. ECN is an optional feature that may be used between two ECN-enabled endpoints when the underlying network infrastructure also supports it.

Conventionally, TCP/IP networks signal congestion by dropping packets. When ECN is successfully negotiated, an ECN-aware router may set a mark in the IP header instead of dropping a packet in order to signal impending congestion. The receiver of the packet echoes the congestion indication to the sender, which reduces its transmission rate as if it detected a dropped packet.

Rather than responding properly or ignoring the bits, some outdated or faulty network equipment has historically dropped or mangled packets that have ECN bits set. As of 2015^[update], measurements suggested that the fraction of web servers on the public Internet for which setting ECN prevents network connections had been reduced to less than 1%.

In June 2015, Apple announced that ECN will be enabled by default on its supported and future products, to help drive the adoption of ECN signaling industry-wide.

ECN requires specific support at both the Internet layer and the transport layer for the following reasons:

Without ECN, congestion indication echo is achieved indirectly by the detection of lost packets. With ECN, the congestion is indicated by setting the ECN field within an IP packet to CE and is echoed back by the receiver to the transmitter by setting proper bits in the header of the transport protocol. For example, when using TCP, the congestion indication is echoed back by setting the ECE bit.

ECN uses the two least significant (right-most) bits of the DiffServ field in the IPv4 or IPv6 header to encode four different codepoints:

When both endpoints support ECN they mark their packets with ECT(0) or ECT(1). If the packet traverses an active queue management (AQM) queue (e.g., a queue that uses random early detection (RED)) that is experiencing congestion and the corresponding router supports ECN, it may change the codepoint to CE instead of dropping the packet. This act is referred to as “marking” and its purpose is to inform the receiving endpoint of impending congestion. At the receiving endpoint, this congestion indication is handled by the upper layer protocol (transport layer protocol) and needs to be echoed back to the transmitting node in order to signal it to reduce its transmission rate.

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