Lossless and overhead free DCCP - UDP header conversion (U-DCCP)
draft-amend-tsvwg-dccp-udp-header-conversion-01

Abstract

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) is a transport-layer protocol that provides upper layers with the ability to use non- reliable congestion-controlled flows. DCCP is not widely deployed in the Internet, and the reason for that can be defined as a typical example of a chicken-egg problem. Even if an application developer decided to use DCCP, the middle-boxes like firewalls and NATs would prevent DCCP end-to-end since they lack support for DCCP. Moreover, as long as the protocol penetration of DCCP does not increase, the middle-boxes will not handle DCCP properly. To overcome this challenge, NAT/NATP traversal and UDP encapsulation for DCCP is already defined. However, the former requires special middle-box support and the latter introduces overhead. The recent proposal of a multipath extension for DCCP further underlines the challenge of efficient middle-box passing as its main goal is to be applied over the Internet, traversing numerous uncontrolled middle-boxes. This document introduces a new solution which disguises DCCP during transmission as UDP without requiring middle-box modification or introducing any overhead.

Authors

Markus Amend
Anna Brunstrom
Andreas Kassler
Veselin Rakocevic

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