Network Working Group L-A. Larzon
Request for Comments: 3828 Lulea University of Technology
Category: Standards Track M. Degermark
S. Pink
The University of Arizona
L-E. Jonsson, Ed.
Ericsson
G. Fairhurst, Ed.
University of Aberdeen
July 2004
The Lightweight User Datagram Protocol (UDP-Lite)
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).
Abstract
This document describes the Lightweight User Datagram Protocol (UDP-
Lite), which is similar to the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) (RFC
768), but can also serve applications in error-prone network
environments that prefer to have partially damaged payloads delivered
rather than discarded. If this feature is not used, UDP-Lite is
semantically identical to UDP.
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RFC 3828 UDP-Lite Protocol July 2004
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Protocol Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Pseudo Header. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Application Interface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.4. IP Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.5. Jumbograms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Lower Layer Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Compatibility with UDP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
10. Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
11. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1. Introduction
This document describes a new transport protocol, UDP-Lite, (also
known as UDPLite). This new protocol is based on three observations:
First, there is a class of applications that benefit from having
damaged data delivered rather than discarded by the network. A
number of codecs for voice and video fall into this class (e.g., the
AMR speech codec [RFC-3267], the Internet Low Bit Rate Codec [ILBRC],
and error resilient H.263+ [ITU-H.263], H.264 [ITU-H.264; H.264], and
MPEG-4 [ISO-14496] video codecs). These codecs may be designed to
cope better with errors in the payload than with loss of entire
packets.
Second, all links that support IP transmission should use a strong
link layer integrity check (e.g., CRC-32 [RFC-3819]), and this MUST
be used by default for IP traffic. When the under-lying link
supports it, certain types of traffic (e.g., UDP-Lite) may benefit
from a different link behavior that permits partially damaged IP
packets to be forwarded when requested [RFC-3819]. Several radio
technologies (e.g., [3GPP]) support this link behavior when operating
at a point where cost and delay are sufficiently low. If error-prone
links are aware of the error sensitive portion of a packet, it is
also possible for the physical link to provide greater protection to
reduce the probability of corruption of these error sensitive bytes
(e.g., the use of unequal Forward Error Correction).
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RFC 3828 UDP-Lite Protocol July 2004
Third, intermediate layers (i.e., IP and the transport layer
datatracker.ietf.org