Network Working Group E. Rescorla
Internet-Draft RTFM, Inc.
Intended status: Standards Track J. Uberti
Expires: April 13, 2013 Google
E. Ivov
Jitsi
October 10, 2012
Trickle ICE: Incremental Provisioning of Candidates for the Interactive
Connectivity Establishment (ICE) Protocol
draft-rescorla-mmusic-ice-trickle-00
Abstract
This document describes an extension to the Interactive Connectivity
Establishment (ICE) protocol that allows ICE agents to send and
receive candidates incrementally rather than exchanging complete
lists. With such incremental provisioning, ICE agents can begin
connectivity checks while they are still gathering candidates and
considerably shorten the time necessary for ICE processing to
complete.
The above mechanism is also referred to as "trickle ICE".
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
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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 April 13, 2013.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 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
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Incompatibility with Standard ICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Detecting Support for Trickle ICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Sending the Initial Offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Receiving the Initial Offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.1. Sending an answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.2. Forming check lists and beginning connectivity checks . . 8
7. Receipt of the Initial Answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. Performing Connectivity Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8.1. Check List and Timer State Updates . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9. Learning and Sending Additional Local Candidates . . . . . . . 9
9.1. Announcing End of Candidates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
10. Receiving Additional Remote Candidates . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
11. Concluding ICE Processing with Trickle ICE . . . . . . . . . . 11
12. Interaction with non-Trickle ICE implementations . . . . . . . 12
13. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
14. Open Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
15. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
15.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
15.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
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1. Introduction
The Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) protocol [RFC5245]
describes mechanisms for gathering, candidates, prioritizing them,
choosing default ones, exchanging them with the remote party, pairing
them and ordering them into check lists. Once all of the above have
been completed, and only then, the participating agents can begin a
phase of connectivity checks and eventually select the pair of
candidates that will be used in the following session.
While the above sequence has the advantage of being relatively
straightforward to implement and debug once deployed, it may also
prove to be rather lengthy. Gathering candidates or candidate
harvesting would often involve things like querying STUN [RFC5389]
servers, discovering UPnP devices, and allocating relayed candidates
at TURN [RFC5766] servers. All of these can be delayed for a
noticeable amount of time and while they can be run in parallel, they
still need to respect the pacing requirements from [RFC5245], which
is likely to delay them even further. Some or all of the above would
also have to be completed by the remote agent. Both agents would
next perform connectivity checks and only then would they be ready to
begin streaming media.
All of the above could lead to relatively lengthy session
establishment times and degraded user experience.
The purpose of this document is to define an alternative mode of
operation for ICE implementations, also known as "trickle ICE", where
candidates can be exchanged incrementally. This would allow ICE
agents to exchange host candidates as soon as a session has been
initiated. Connectivity checks for a media stream would also start
as soon as the first candidates for that stream have become
available.
Trickle ICE allows reducing session establishment times in cases
where connectivity is confirmed for the first exchanged candidates
(e.g. where the host candidates for one of the agents are directly
reachable from the second agent). Even when this is not the case,
running candidate harvesting for both agents and connectivity checks
all in parallel allows to considerably reduce ICE processing times.
It is worth pointing out that before being introduced to the IETF,
trickle ICE had already been included in specifications such as XMPP
Jingle [XEP-0176] and it has been in use in various implementations
and deployments.
In addition to the basics of trickle ICE, this document also
describes how support for trickle ICE needs to be discovered, how
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regular ICE processing needs to be modified when building and
updating check lists, and how trickle ICE implementations should
interoperate with agents that only implement [RFC5245] processing.
This specification does not define usage of trickle ICE with any
specific signalling or media description protocol, contrary to
[RFC5245] which defined a usage for ICE wht SIP and SDP. Such usages
would have to be specified in separate documents.
2. Terminology
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].
This specification makes use of all terminology defined by the
protocol for Interactive Connectivity Establishment in [RFC5245].
Vanilla ICE: The Interactive Connectivity Establishment protocol as
defined in [RFC5245].
Candidate Harvester: A module used by an ICE agent to obtain local
candidates. Candidate harvesters use different mechanisms for
discovering local candidates. Some of them would typically make
use of protocols such as STUN or TURN. Others may also employ
techniques that are not referenced within [RFC5245]. UPnP based
port allocation and XMPP Jingle Relay Nodes [XEP-0278] are among
the possible examples.
3. Incompatibility with Standard ICE
The ICE protocol was designed to be fairly flexible so that it would
work in and adapt to as many network environments as possible. It is
hence important to point out at least some of the reasons why,
despite its flexibility, the specification in [RFC5245] would not
support trickle-ICE.
[RFC5245] describes the conditions required to update check lists and
timer states while an ICE agent is in the Running state. These
conditions are verified upon transaction completion and one of them
stipulates that:
If there is not a pair in the valid list for each component of the
media stream, the state of the check list is set to Failed.
This could be a problem and cause ICE processing to fail prematurely
in a number of scenarios. Consider the following case:
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o Alice and Bob are both located in different networks with Network
Address Translation (NAT). Alice and Bob themselves have
different address but both networks use the same [RFC1918] block.
o Alice sends Bob the candidate 10.0.0.10 which also happens to
correspond to an existing host on Bob's network.
o Bob creates a check list consisting solely of 10.0.0.10 and starts
checks.
o These checks reach the host at 10.0.0.10 in Bob's network, which
responds with an ICMP "port unreachable" error and per [RFC5245]
Bob marks the transaction as Failed.
At this point the check list only contains Failed candidates and the
valid list is empty. This causes the media stream and potentially
all ICE processing to Fail.
A similar race condition would occur if the initial offer from Alice
only contains candidates that can be determined as unreachable (per
[I-D.keranen-mmusic-ice-address-selection]) from any of the
candidates that Bob has gathered. This would be the case if Bob's
candidates only contain IPv4 addresses and the first candidate that
he receives from Alice is an IPv6 one.
Another potential problem could arise when a non-trickle ICE
implementation sends an offer to a trickle one. Consider the
following case:
o Alice's client has a non-trickle ICE implementation
o Bob's client has support for trickle ICE.
o Alice and Bob are behind NATs with address-dependent filtering
[RFC4787].
o Bob has two STUN servers but one of them is currently unreachable
After Bob's agent receives Alice's offer it would immediately start
connectivity checks. It would also start gathering candidates, which
would take long because of the unreachable STUN server. By the time
Bob's answer is ready and sent to Alice, Bob's connectivity checks
may well have failed: until Alice gets Bob's answer, she won't be
able to start connectivity checks and punch holes in her NAT. The
NAT would hence be filtering Bob's checks as originating from an
unknown endpoint.
4. Detecting Support for Trickle ICE
In order to avoid interoperability problems such as those described
in Section 3, it is important that, before generating an offer and
sending its first candidates an agent SHOULD first verify whether its
correspondent also supports trickle ICE.
The exact mechanisms that would allow for such verifications are
outside the scope of this document and should be handled by the
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signalling protocol that is employing ICE.
Examples of how some signalling protocols already handle service and
capabilities discovery include:
o Service discovery [XEP-0030] and Entity capabilities [XEP-0115]
for XMPP
o Indicating User Agent Capabilities [RFC3840] for SIP
Usages of trickle ICE SHOULD make use of these mechanisms where they
exist.
Also, in some cases it would be possible for an application to just
"know" that support would be present. One example for this would be
a WebRTC application that does not need to interoperate with
applications from other web sites. Such applications can just enable
trickle ICE without performing any additional checks.
In other cases yet, agents may choose to just send an offer that the
remote party would reject as invalid unless it supports trickling.
One such example would be an offer with no ICE candidates and an
invalid default address (e.g. 0.0.0.0).
Usages of trickle ICE MUST define a way for offers or answers
transporting the initial list of ICE candidates to indicate support
for trickling. Note that an offer or an answer may indicate lack of
support for trickle ICE even if other mechanisms have allowed to
confirm that the remote agent does support it. In such cases agents
should act as if trickle ICE is not supported for this particular
session.
5. Sending the Initial Offer
An agent starts gathering candidates as soon as it has an indication
that communication is imminent (e.g. a user interface cue or an
explicit request to initiate a session). However, contrary to
vanilla ICE, implementations of trickle ICE do not need to gather
candidates in a blocking manner, strictly preceding the generation
and transmission of their initial offer.
Trickle ICE agents MAY include any set of candidates in their initial
offer. This includes the possibility of generating an offer with no
candidates, or one that contains all the candidates that the agent is
planning on using in the following session.
For optimal performance, it is RECOMMENDED that an initial offer
contains host candidates only. This would allow both agents to start
gathering server reflexive, relayed and other non-host candidates
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simultaneously, and it would also enable them to begin connectivity
checks.
If the privacy implications of revealing host addresses are a
concern, agents MAY generate an initial offer that contains no
candidates and then only trickle candidates that do not reveal host
addresses (e.g. relayed candidates).
Prior to actually sending an offer, agents SHOULD verify if the
remote party supports trickle ICE. If absence of such support is
confirmed agents SHOULD fall back to using vanilla ICE or abandon the
entire session.
All trickle ICE offers MUST indicate support of this specification.
The exact means of providing this indication is left to the usages
that define how signalling protocols employ trickle ICE.
Calculating priorities and foundations, as well as determining
redundancy of candidates work the same way they do with vanilla ICE.
6. Receiving the Initial Offer
When an agent receives an initial ICE-enabled offer, it will check if
the offerer supports trickle ICE as explained in Section 4. If this
is not the case, the agent MUST process this offer according to the
[RFC5245] procedures or standard [RFC3264] processing in case no ICE
support is detected at all.
If, the offer does indicate support for trickle ICE, the agent will
determine its role, start gathering and prioritizing candidates and,
while doing so it will also send an answer, in order to start forming
check lists and begin connectivity checks.
6.1. Sending an answer
The agent can create and send an answer at any point while gathering
candidates. Just as with offers, answers can contain no or all
candidates an agent is planning on using. Again, as with offers, it
is RECOMMENDED that answers contain host candidates so that the
remote party can also start forming checklists and performing
connectivity checks.
The answer MUST indicate support for trickle ICE as described by
usage specifications.
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6.2. Forming check lists and beginning connectivity checks
After sending an answer, and as soon as they have gathered any
candidates, agents will begin forming candidate pairs, computing
their priorities and creating check lists according to the vanilla
ICE procedures described in [RFC5245]. Obviously in order for
candidate pairing to be possible, it would be necessary that both the
offer and the ensuing answer contained candidates. If this was not
the case agents will still create the check lists (so that their
Active/Frozen state could be monitored and updated) but they will
only populate them once they have learned any local and remote
candidates.
Initially, all check lists will have their Active/Frozen state set to
Frozen.
Trickle ICE agents will then also attempt to unfreeze the check list
for the first media stream (i.e. the first media stream that was
reported to the ICE implementation from the using application). If
this checklist is still empty however, agents will continue examining
media streams in the order they were reported and will unfreeze the
first non-empty checklist.
Respecting the order in which lists have been reported to an ICE
implementation, or in other words, the order in which streams had
been described by the signalling protocol (e.g. SDP), is necessary
so that checks for the same media stream would be performed
simultaneously by both agents.
7. Receipt of the Initial Answer
When receiving an answer, agents will follow vanilla ICE procedures
to determine their role and they would then form check lists and
begin connectivity checks as described in Section 6.2.
8. Performing Connectivity Checks
For the most part, trickle ICE agents perform connectivity checks
following vanilla ICE procedures. Of course, the asynchronous nature
of candidate harvesting in trickle ICE would impose a number of
changes:
8.1. Check List and Timer State Updates
The vanilla ICE specification requires that agents update check lists
and timer states upon completing a connectivity check transaction.
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During such an update vanilla ICE agents would set the state of a
check list to Failed if the following two conditions are satisfied:
o all of the pairs in the check list are either in the Failed or
Succeeded state;
o if at least one of the components of the media stream has no pairs
in its valid list.
With trickle ICE, the above situation would often occur when
candidate harvesting and trickling are still in progress and it is
perfectly possible that future checks will succeed. For this reason
trickle ICE agents add the following conditions to the above list:
o all candidate harvesters have completed and the agent is not
expecting to learn any new candidates;
o the remote agent has sent an end-of-candidates message for that
check list as described in Section 9.1.
Vanilla ICE requires that agents then update all other check lists,
placing one pair in each of them into the Waiting state, effectively
unfreezing the check list. Given that with trickle ICE, other check
lists may still be empty at that point, a trickle ICE agent SHOULD
also maintain an explicit Active/Frozen state for every check list,
rather than deducing it from the state of the pairs it contains.
This state should be set to Active when unfreezing the first pair in
a list or when that couldn't happen because a list was empty.
9. Learning and Sending Additional Local Candidates
After an initial offer has been sent or received, agents will most
likely continue discovering new local candidates as STUN, TURN and
other non-host candidate harvesting mechanisms begin to yield
results. Whenever such a new candidate is learned agents will
compute its priority, type, foundation and component id according to
normal vanilla ICE procedures.
The new candidate is then checked for redundancy against the existing
list of local candidates. If its transport address and base match
those of an existing candidate, it will be considered redundant and
will be ignored. This would often happen for server reflexive
candidates that match the host addresses they were obtained from
(e.g. when the latter are public IPv4 addresses). Contrary to
vanilla ICE, trickle ICE agents will consider the new candidate
redundant regardless of its priority. [TODO: is this OK? if not we
need to check if the existing candidate was already used in conn
checks, cancel them, and then restart them with the new candidate ...
and in this specific case there's probably no point to do that].
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Then, if no remote candidates are currently known for this same
stream, the new candidate will simply be added to the list of local
candidates.
Otherwise, if the agent has already learned of one or more remote
candidates for this stream and component, it will begin pairing the
new local candidates with them and adding the pairs to the existing
check lists according to their priority. Forming candidate pairs
will work the way it is described by the vanilla ICE specification.
Actually adding the new pair to a check list however, will happen
according to the rules described below.
If the new pair's local candidate is server reflexive, the server
reflexive candidate MUST be replaced by its base before adding the
pair to the list. Once this is done, the agent examines the check
list looking for another pair that would be redundant with the new
one. If such a pair exists and its state is:
Succeeded: the newly formed pair is ignored.
Frozen or Waiting: the agent chooses the pair with the higher
priority local candidate, places it in the state that the old pair
was in (i.e. Frozen or Waiting) and removes the other one as
redundant.
Failed: the agent chooses the pair with the higher priority local
candidate, places it in the Waiting state and removes the other
one as redundant.
In-Progress: The agent cancels the in-progress transaction (where
cancellation happens as explained in Section 7.2.1.4 of
[RFC5245]), then it chooses the pair with the higher priority
local candidate, places it in the Waiting state and removes the
other one as redundant.
For all other pairs, including those with a server reflexive local
candidate that were not found to be redundant:
o if this check list is Frozen then the new pair will also be
assigned a Frozen state.
o else if the check list is Active and it is either empty or
contains only candidates in the Succeeded and Failed states, then
the new pair's state is set to Waiting.
o else if the check list is non-empty and Active, then the new pair
state will be set to
Frozen: if there is at least one pair in the list whose
foundation matches the one in the new pair and whose state is
neither Succeeded nor Failed (eventually the new pair will get
unfrozen after the the on-going check for the existing pair
concludes);
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Waiting: if the list contains no pairs with the same foundation
as the new one, or, in case such pairs exist, they are all in
either the Succeeded or Failed states.
9.1. Announcing End of Candidates
Once all candidate harvesters for a specific media stream complete,
or expire, the agent MUST generate an "end-of-candidates" event for
that stream and send it to the remote agent via the signalling
channel. This would allow the remote agent to begin updating check
list states and, in case valid pairs do not exist for every component
in every media stream, determine that ICE processing has failed.
An agent MAY also choose to generate an "end-of-candidates" event
before candidate harvesting has actually completed, if the agent
determines that harvesting has continued for more than an acceptable
period of time.
Once the agent sends the end-of-candidates event, it SHOULD update
the state of the corresponding check list as explained in section
Section 8.1
[TODO: should we also have an end-of-candidates for the entire
harvesting process (as opposed to that of a single stream)]
10. Receiving Additional Remote Candidates
At any point of ICE processing, a trickle ICE agent may receive new
candidates from the remote agent. When this happens and no local
candidates are currently known for this same stream, the new remote
candidates are simply added to the list of remote candidates.
Otherwise, the new candidates are used for forming candidate pairs
with the pool of local candidates.
Once the remote agent has completed candidate harvesting, it will
send an "end-of-candidates" event. Upon receiving such an event, the
local agent MUST update check list states as per Section 8.1. This
may lead to some check lists being marked as Failed.
11. Concluding ICE Processing with Trickle ICE
Trickle ICE processing SHOULD be concluded as explained in Section 8
of [RFC5245].
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12. Interaction with non-Trickle ICE implementations
Trickle ICE implementations MUST behave as non-trickle and follow
[RFC5245] unless they can confirm that the remote party supports this
specification. [TODO: anything else?]
13. Security Considerations
[TODO]
14. Open Issues
At the time of writing of this document the authors have no clear
view on how and if the following list of issues should be address
here:
1. FILL IN
15. References
15.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC5245] Rosenberg, J., "Interactive Connectivity Establishment
(ICE): A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT)
Traversal for Offer/Answer Protocols", RFC 5245,
April 2010.
15.2. Informative References
[I-D.keranen-mmusic-ice-address-selection]
Keranen, A. and J. Arkko, "Update on Candidate Address
Selection for Interactive Connectivity Establishment
(ICE)", draft-keranen-mmusic-ice-address-selection-01
(work in progress), July 2012.
[RFC1918] Rekhter, Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Groot, G., and
E. Lear, "Address Allocation for Private Internets",
BCP 5, RFC 1918, February 1996.
[RFC3264] Rosenberg, J. and H. Schulzrinne, "An Offer/Answer Model
with Session Description Protocol (SDP)", RFC 3264,
June 2002.
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[RFC3840] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., and P. Kyzivat,
"Indicating User Agent Capabilities in the Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP)", RFC 3840, August 2004.
[RFC4787] Audet, F. and C. Jennings, "Network Address Translation
(NAT) Behavioral Requirements for Unicast UDP", BCP 127,
RFC 4787, January 2007.
[RFC5389] Rosenberg, J., Mahy, R., Matthews, P., and D. Wing,
"Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN)", RFC 5389,
October 2008.
[RFC5766] Mahy, R., Matthews, P., and J. Rosenberg, "Traversal Using
Relays around NAT (TURN): Relay Extensions to Session
Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN)", RFC 5766, April 2010.
[XEP-0030]
Hildebrand, J., Millard, P., Eatmon, R., and P. Saint-
Andre, "XEP-0030: Service Discovery", XEP XEP-0030,
June 2008.
[XEP-0115]
Hildebrand, J., Saint-Andre, P., Troncon, R., and J.
Konieczny, "XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities", XEP XEP-0115,
February 2008.
[XEP-0176]
Beda, J., Ludwig, S., Saint-Andre, P., Hildebrand, J.,
Egan, S., and R. McQueen, "XEP-0176: Jingle ICE-UDP
Transport Method", XEP XEP-0176, June 2009.
[XEP-0278]
Camargo, T., "XEP-0278: Jingle Relay Nodes", XEP XEP-0278,
June 2011.
Authors' Addresses
Eric Rescorla
RTFM, Inc.
2064 Edgewood Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94303
USA
Phone: +1 650 678 2350
Email: ekr@rtfm.com
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Justin Uberti
Google
747 6th St S
Kirkland, WA 98033
USA
Phone: +1 857 288 8888
Email: justin@uberti.name
Emil Ivov
Jitsi
Strasbourg 67000
France
Phone: +33 6 72 81 15 55
Email: emcho@jitsi.org
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