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RTCWeb Data Channels
draft-ietf-rtcweb-data-channel-04

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 8831.
Authors Randell Jesup , Salvatore Loreto , Michael Tüxen
Last updated 2013-02-25
Replaces draft-jesup-rtcweb-data
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draft-ietf-rtcweb-data-channel-04
Network Working Group                                           R. Jesup
Internet-Draft                                                   Mozilla
Intended status: Standards Track                               S. Loreto
Expires: August 29, 2013                                        Ericsson
                                                               M. Tuexen
                                        Muenster Univ. of Appl. Sciences
                                                       February 25, 2013

                          RTCWeb Data Channels
                 draft-ietf-rtcweb-data-channel-04.txt

Abstract

   The Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) working group is charged to
   provide protocol support for direct interactive rich communication
   using audio, video, and data between two peers' web-browsers.  This
   document specifies the non-media data transport aspects of the WebRTC
   framework.  It provides an architectural overview of how the Stream
   Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is used in the WebRTC context as
   a generic transport service allowing Web Browser to exchange generic
   data from peer to peer.

Status of this Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on August 29, 2013.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of

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   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Conventions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   3.  Use Cases  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     3.1.  Use Cases for Unreliable Data Channels . . . . . . . . . .  4
     3.2.  Use Cases for Reliable Data Channels . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   4.  Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   5.  SCTP over DTLS over UDP Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   6.  The Usage of SCTP in the RTCWeb Context  . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.1.  Association Setup  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.2.  SCTP Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.3.  Channel Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.4.  Usage of Payload Protocol Identifier . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   7.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   8.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   9.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

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1.  Introduction

   Non-media data types in the context of RTCWeb are handled by using
   SCTP [RFC4960] encapsulated in DTLS [RFC6347].

                                +----------+
                                |   SCTP   |
                                +----------+
                                |   DTLS   |
                                +----------+
                                | ICE/UDP  |
                                +----------+

                       Figure 1: Basic stack diagram

   The encapsulation of SCTP over DTLS (see
   [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-sctp-dtls-encaps]) over ICE/UDP (see [RFC5245])
   provides a NAT traversal solution together with confidentiality,
   source authentication, and integrity protected transfers.  This data
   transport service operates in parallel to the media transports, and
   all of them can eventually share a single transport-layer port
   number.

   SCTP as specified in [RFC4960] with the partial reliability extension
   defined in [RFC3758] provides multiple streams natively with
   reliable, and partially-reliable delivery modes.

   The remainder of this document is organized as follows: Section 4 and
   Section 3 provide requirements and use cases for both unreliable and
   reliable peer to peer datagram base channel; Section 5 arguments SCTP
   over DTLS over UDP; Section 6 provides an specification of how SCTP
   should be used by the RTCWeb protocol framework for transporting non-
   media data between browsers.

2.  Conventions

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

3.  Use Cases

   This section defined use cases specific to data channels.  For
   general use cases see [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-use-cases-and-requirements].

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3.1.  Use Cases for Unreliable Data Channels

   U-C 1  A real-time game where position and object state information
          is sent via one or more unreliable data channels.  Note that
          at any time there may be no media channels, or all media
          channels may be inactive, and that there may also be reliable
          data channels in use.

   U-C 2  Providing non-critical information to a user about the reason
          for a state update in a video chat or conference, such as Mute
          state.

3.2.  Use Cases for Reliable Data Channels

   U-C 3  A real-time game where critical state information needs to be
          transferred, such as control information.  Such a game may
          have no media channels, or they may be inactive at any given
          time, or may only be added due to in-game actions.

   U-C 4  Non-realtime file transfers between people chatting.  Note
          that this may involve a large number of files to transfer
          sequentially or in parallel, such as when sharing a folder of
          images or a directory of files.

   U-C 5  Realtime text chat while talking with an individual or with
          multiple people in a conference.

   U-C 6  Renegotiation of the set of media streams in the
          PeerConnection.

   U-C 7  Proxy browsing, where a browser uses data channels of a
          PeerConnection to send and receive HTTP/HTTPS requests and
          data, for example to avoid local internet filtering or
          monitoring.

4.  Requirements

   This section lists the requirements for P2P data channels between two
   browsers.

   Req. 1   Multiple simultaneous data channels MUST be supported.  Note
            that there may 0 or more media streams in parallel with the
            data channels, and the number and state (active/inactive) of
            the media streams may change at any time.

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   Req. 2   Both reliable and unreliable data channels MUST be
            supported.

   Req. 3   Data channels MUST be congestion controlled; either
            individually, as a class, or in conjunction with the media
            streams, to ensure that data channels don't cause congestion
            problems for the media streams, and that the RTCWeb
            PeerConnection as a whole is fair with competing traffic
            such as TCP.

   Req. 4   The application SHOULD be able to provide guidance as to the
            relative priority of each data channel relative to each
            other, and relative to the media streams. [ TBD: how this is
            encoded and what the impact of this is. ] This will interact
            with the congestion control algorithms.

   Req. 5   Data channels MUST be secured; allowing for confidentiality,
            integrity and source authentication.  See
            [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-security] and
            [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-security-arch] for detailed info.

   Req. 6   Data channels MUST provide message fragmentation support
            such that IP-layer fragmentation can be avoided no matter
            how large a message the Javascript application passes to be
            sent.  It also MUST ensure that large data channel transfers
            don't unduely delay traffic on other data channels.

   Req. 7   The data channel transport protocol MUST NOT encode local IP
            addresses inside its protocol fields; doing so reveals
            potentially private information, and leads to failure if the
            address is depended upon.

   Req. 8   The data channel transport protocol SHOULD support
            unbounded-length "messages" (i.e., a virtual socket stream)
            at the application layer, for such things as image-file-
            transfer; Implementations might enforce a reasonable message
            size limit.

   Req. 9   The data channel transport protocol SHOULD avoid IP
            fragmentation.  It MUST support PMTU discovery and MUST NOT
            rely on ICMP or ICMPv6 being generated or being passed back,
            especially for PMTU discovery.

   Req. 10  It MUST be possible to implement the protocol stack in the
            user application space.

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5.  SCTP over DTLS over UDP Considerations

   The important features of SCTP in the RTCWeb context are:

   o  TCP-friendly congestion control.

   o  The congestion control is modifiable for integration with media
      stream congestion control.

   o  Support for multiple channels with different characteristics.

   o  Support for out-of-order delivery.

   o  Support for large datagrams and PMTU-discovery and fragmentation.

   o  Reliable or partial reliability support.

   o  Support of multiple streams.

   SCTP multihoming will not be used in RTCWeb.  The SCTP layer will
   simply act as if it were running on a single-homed host, since that
   is the abstraction that the lower layer (a connection oriented,
   unreliable datagram service) exposes.

   The encapsulation of SCTP over DTLS defined in
   [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-sctp-dtls-encaps] provides confidentiality, source
   authenticated, and integrity protected transfers.  Using DTLS over
   UDP in combination with ICE enables NAT traversal in IPv4 based
   networks.  SCTP as specified in [RFC4960] MUST be used in combination
   with the extension defined in [RFC3758] and provides the following
   interesting features for transporting non-media data between
   browsers:

   o  Support of multiple unidirectional streams.

   o  Ordered and unordered delivery of user messages.

   o  Reliable and partial-reliable transport of user messages.

   Each SCTP user message contains a so called Payload Protocol
   Identifier (PPID) that is passed to SCTP by its upper layer and sent
   to its peer.  This value can be used to multiplex multiple protocols
   over a single SCTP association.  The sender provides for each
   protocol a specific PPID and the receiver can demultiplex the
   messages based on the received PPID.

   The encapsulation of SCTP over DTLS, together with the SCTP features
   listed above satisfies all the requirements listed in Section 4.

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   The layering of protocols for WebRTC is shown in the following
   Figure 2.

                                         +------+
                                         |RTCWEB|
                                         | DATA |
                                         +------+
                                         | SCTP |
                           +--------------------+
                           | STUN | SRTP | DTLS |
                           +--------------------+
                           |         ICE        |
                           +--------------------+
                           | UDP1 | UDP2 | ...  |
                           +--------------------+

                     Figure 2: WebRTC protocol layers

   This stack (especially in contrast to DTLS over SCTP [RFC6083] in
   combination with SCTP over UDP [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-sctp-udp-encaps]) has
   been chosen because it

   o  supports the transmission of arbitrary large user messages.

   o  shares the DTLS connection with the media channels.

   o  provides privacy for the SCTP control information.

   Considering the protocol stack of Figure 2 the usage of DTLS over UDP
   is specified in [RFC6347], while the usage of SCTP on top of DTLS is
   specified in [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-sctp-dtls-encaps].

   Since DTLS is typically implemented in user-land, the SCTP stack also
   needs to be a user-land stack.

   When using DTLS as the lower layer, only single homed SCTP
   associations MUST be used, since DTLS does not expose any address
   management to its upper layer.  The ICE/UDP layer can handle IP
   address changes during a session without needing to notify the DTLS
   and SCTP layers, though it would be advantageous to retest path MTU
   on an IP address change.

   DTLS implementations used for this stack SHOULD support controlling
   fields of the IP layer like the Don't fragment (DF)-bit in case of
   IPv4 and the Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) field required
   for supporting [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-qos].  Being able to set the (DF)-bit
   in case of IPv4 is required for performing path MTU discovery.  The
   DTLS implementation SHOULD also support sending user messages

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   exceeding the path MTU.

   Incoming ICMP or ICMPv6 messages can't be processed by the SCTP
   layer, since there is no way to identify the corresponding
   association.  Therefore SCTP MUST support performing Path MTU
   discovery without relying on ICMP or ICMPv6 as specified in [RFC4821]
   using probing messages specified in [RFC4820].  The initial Path MTU
   MUST NOT exceed 1280 [ *** need justification ***] bytes until
   measured otherwise.

   In general, the lower layer interface of an SCTP implementation
   SHOULD be adapted to address the differences between IPv4 or IPv6
   (being connection-less) or DTLS (being connection-oriented).

   When protocol stack of Figure 2 is used, DTLS protects the complete
   SCTP packet, so it provides confidentiality, integrity and source
   authentication of the complete SCTP packet.

   This protocol stack MUST support the usage of multiple SCTP streams.
   A user message can be sent ordered or unordered and with partial or
   full reliability.  The partial reliability extension MUST support
   policies to limit

   o  the transmission and retransmission by time.

   o  the number of retransmissions.

   Limiting the number of retransmissions to zero combined with
   unordered delivery provides a UDP-like service where each user
   message is sent exactly once and delivered in the order received.

   SCTP provides congestion control on a per-association base.  This
   means that all SCTP streams within a single SCTP association share
   the same congestion window.  Traffic not being sent over SCTP is not
   covered by the SCTP congestion control.  Due to the typical parallel
   SRTP media streams, a delay-sensitive congestion control algorithm
   MUST be supported and the congestion control MAY be coordinated
   between the data channels and the media streams to avoid a data
   channel transfer ending up with most or all the channel bandwidth.

   Since SCTP does not support the negotiation of a congestion control
   algorithm, the algorithm either MUST be negotiated before
   establishment of the SCTP association or MUST NOT require any
   negotiation because it only requires sender side behavior using
   existing information carried in the association.

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6.  The Usage of SCTP in the RTCWeb Context

6.1.  Association Setup

   The SCTP association will be set up when the two endpoints of the
   WebRTC PeerConnection agree on opening it, as negotiated by JSEP
   (typically an exchange of SDP) [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-jsep].  Additionally,
   the negotiation SHOULD include some type of congestion control
   selection.  It will use the DTLS connection selected via SDP;
   typically this will be shared via BUNDLE or equivalent with DTLS
   connections used to key the DTLS-SRTP media streams.

   The application SHOULD indicate the initial number of streams
   required when opening the association, and if no value is supplied,
   the implementation SHOULD provide an appropriate default.  If more
   simultaneous streams are needed, [RFC6525] allows adding additional
   (but not removing) streams to an existing association.  Note there
   can be up to 65536 SCTP streams per SCTP association in each
   direction.

6.2.  SCTP Streams

   SCTP defines a stream as an unidirectional logical channel existing
   within an SCTP association one to another SCTP endpoint.  The streams
   are used to provide the notion of in-sequence delivery and for
   multiplexing.  Each user message is sent on a particular stream,
   either order or unordered.  Ordering is preserved only for ordered
   messages sent on the same stream.

6.3.  Channel Definition

   The W3C has consensus on defining the application API for WebRTC
   dataChannels to be bidirectional.  They also consider the notions of
   in-sequence, out-of-sequence, reliable and un-reliable as properties
   of Channels.  One strong wish is for the application-level API to be
   close to the API for WebSockets, which implies bidirectional streams
   of data and waiting for onopen to fire before sending, a textual
   label used to identify the meaning of the stream, among other things.

   The realization of a bidirectional Data Channel is a pair of one
   incoming stream and one outgoing SCTP stream.

   The simple protocol specified in [I-D.jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol]
   MUST be used to set up and manage the bidirectional data channels.

   Note that there's no requirement for the SCTP streams used to create
   a bidirectional channel have the same number in each direction.  How
   stream values are selected is protocol and implementation dependent.

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   Closing of a Data Channel MUST be signaled by resetting the
   corresponding streams [RFC6525].  Resetting a stream set the Stream
   Sequence Numbers (SSNs) of the stream back to 'zero' with a
   corresponding notification to the application layer that the reset
   has been performed.  Streams are available to reuse after a reset has
   been performed.

   [RFC6525] also guarantees that all the messages are delivered (or
   expired) before resetting the stream.

6.4.  Usage of Payload Protocol Identifier

   The SCTP Payload Protocol Identifiers (PPIDs) can be used to signal
   the interpretation of the "Payload data", like the protocol specified
   in [I-D.jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol] uses them to identify a
   Javascript string, a Javascript binary data (ArrayBuffer or Blob) and
   to provide fragmentation support for large messages that may cause
   the message to monopolize the SCTP association.

7.  Security Considerations

   This document does not add any additional considerations to the ones
   given in [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-security] and
   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-security-arch].

8.  IANA Considerations

   This document does not require any actions by the IANA.

9.  Acknowledgments

   Many thanks for comments, ideas, and text from Harald Alvestrand,
   Adam Bergkvist, Cullen Jennings, Eric Rescorla, Randall Stewart,
   Justin Uberti, and Magnus Westerlund.

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC3758]  Stewart, R., Ramalho, M., Xie, Q., Tuexen, M., and P.
              Conrad, "Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP)

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              Partial Reliability Extension", RFC 3758, May 2004.

   [RFC4820]  Tuexen, M., Stewart, R., and P. Lei, "Padding Chunk and
              Parameter for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol
              (SCTP)", RFC 4820, March 2007.

   [RFC4821]  Mathis, M. and J. Heffner, "Packetization Layer Path MTU
              Discovery", RFC 4821, March 2007.

   [RFC4960]  Stewart, R., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
              RFC 4960, September 2007.

   [RFC5245]  Rosenberg, J., "Interactive Connectivity Establishment
              (ICE): A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT)
              Traversal for Offer/Answer Protocols", RFC 5245,
              April 2010.

   [RFC6347]  Rescorla, E. and N. Modadugu, "Datagram Transport Layer
              Security Version 1.2", RFC 6347, January 2012.

   [RFC6525]  Stewart, R., Tuexen, M., and P. Lei, "Stream Control
              Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Stream Reconfiguration",
              RFC 6525, February 2012.

   [I-D.jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol]
              Jesup, R., Loreto, S., and M. Tuexen, "WebRTC Data Channel
              Protocol", draft-jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol-03 (work in
              progress), September 2012.

   [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-sctp-dtls-encaps]
              Jesup, R., Loreto, S., Stewart, R., and M. Tuexen, "DTLS
              Encapsulation of SCTP Packets for RTCWEB",
              draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctp-dtls-encaps-00 (work in progress),
              February 2013.

   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-security]
              Rescorla, E., "Security Considerations for RTC-Web",
              draft-ietf-rtcweb-security-04 (work in progress),
              January 2013.

   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-security-arch]
              Rescorla, E., "RTCWEB Security Architecture",
              draft-ietf-rtcweb-security-arch-06 (work in progress),
              January 2013.

   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-jsep]
              Uberti, J. and C. Jennings, "Javascript Session
              Establishment Protocol", draft-ietf-rtcweb-jsep-02 (work

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              in progress), October 2012.

   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-qos]
              Dhesikan, S., Druta, D., Jones, P., and J. Polk, "DSCP and
              other packet markings for RTCWeb QoS",
              draft-ietf-rtcweb-qos-00 (work in progress), October 2012.

10.2.  Informative References

   [RFC6083]  Tuexen, M., Seggelmann, R., and E. Rescorla, "Datagram
              Transport Layer Security (DTLS) for Stream Control
              Transmission Protocol (SCTP)", RFC 6083, January 2011.

   [I-D.ietf-rtcweb-use-cases-and-requirements]
              Holmberg, C., Hakansson, S., and G. Eriksson, "Web Real-
              Time Communication Use-cases and Requirements",
              draft-ietf-rtcweb-use-cases-and-requirements-10 (work in
              progress), December 2012.

   [I-D.ietf-tsvwg-sctp-udp-encaps]
              Tuexen, M. and R. Stewart, "UDP Encapsulation of SCTP
              Packets for End-Host to End-Host Communication",
              draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctp-udp-encaps-11 (work in progress),
              February 2013.

Authors' Addresses

   Randell Jesup
   Mozilla
   US

   Email: randell-ietf@jesup.org

   Salvatore Loreto
   Ericsson
   Hirsalantie 11
   Jorvas  02420
   FI

   Email: salvatore.loreto@ericsson.com

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   Michael Tuexen
   Muenster University of Applied Sciences
   Stegerwaldstrasse 39
   Steinfurt  48565
   DE

   Email: tuexen@fh-muenster.de

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