UDP Usage Guidelines
draft-ietf-tsvwg-rfc5405bis-01
Transport Area Working Group L. Eggert
Internet-Draft NetApp
Obsoletes: 5405 (if approved) G. Fairhurst
Intended status: Best Current Practice University of Aberdeen
Expires: August 23, 2015 G. Shepherd
Cisco Systems
February 19, 2015
UDP Usage Guidelines
draft-ietf-tsvwg-rfc5405bis-01
Abstract
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provides a minimal message-passing
transport that has no inherent congestion control mechanisms.
Because congestion control is critical to the stable operation of the
Internet, applications and other protocols that choose to use UDP as
an Internet transport must employ mechanisms to prevent congestion
collapse and to establish some degree of fairness with concurrent
traffic. They may also need to implement additional mechanisms,
depending on how they use UDP.
This document provides guidelines on the use of UDP for the designers
of applications, tunnels and other protocols that use UDP.
Congestion control guidelines are a primary focus, but the document
also provides guidance on other topics, including message sizes,
reliability, checksums, and middlebox traversal.
If published as an RFC, this document will obsolete RFC5405.
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 23, 2015.
Eggert, et al. Expires August 23, 2015 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft UDP Usage Guidelines February 2015
Copyright Notice
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. UDP Usage Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Congestion Control Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Message Size Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3. Reliability Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.4. Checksum Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.5. Middlebox Traversal Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4. Multicast UDP Usage Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.1. Multicast Congestion Control Guidelines . . . . . . . . . 21
4.2. Message Size Guidelines for Multicast . . . . . . . . . . 23
5. Programming Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
5.1. Using UDP Ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5.2. ICMP Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
7. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
9. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Appendix A. Case Study of the Use of IPv6 UDP Zero-Checksum Mode 38
Appendix B. Revision Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
1. Introduction
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) [RFC0768] provides a minimal,
unreliable, best-effort, message-passing transport to applications
and other protocols (such as tunnels) that desire to operate over UDP
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