UDP Usage Guidelines
draft-ietf-tsvwg-rfc5405bis-03
Transport Area Working Group L. Eggert
Internet-Draft NetApp
Obsoletes: 5405 (if approved) G. Fairhurst
Intended status: Best Current Practice University of Aberdeen
Expires: January 8, 2016 G. Shepherd
Cisco Systems
July 7, 2015
UDP Usage Guidelines
draft-ietf-tsvwg-rfc5405bis-03
Abstract
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provides a minimal message-passing
transport that has no inherent congestion control mechanisms. 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, middlebox traversal, the use of ECN, DSCPs,
and ports.
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.
Some guidance is also applicable to the design of other protocols
(e.g., protocols layered directly on IP or via IP-based tunnels),
especially when these protocols do not themselves provide congestion
control.
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/.
Eggert, et al. Expires January 8, 2016 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft UDP Usage Guidelines July 2015
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 January 8, 2016.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2015 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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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. UDP Usage Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. Congestion Control Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.2. Message Size Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.3. Reliability Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.4. Checksum Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.5. Middlebox Traversal Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4. Multicast UDP Usage Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.1. Multicast Congestion Control Guidelines . . . . . . . . . 24
4.2. Message Size Guidelines for Multicast . . . . . . . . . . 26
5. Programming Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.1. Using UDP Ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5.2. ICMP Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
9. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Appendix A. Case Study of the Use of IPv6 UDP Zero-Checksum Mode 42
Appendix B. Revision Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
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