RFC 8085
UDP Usage Guidelines
Pages: 55
Best Current Practice: 145
→ Errata
Obsoletes: 5405
Updated by: 8899
Best Current Practice: 145
→ Errata
Obsoletes: 5405
Updated by: 8899
Part 1 of 3 – Pages 1 to 20
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) L. Eggert Request for Comments: 8085 NetApp BCP: 145 G. Fairhurst Obsoletes: 5405 University of Aberdeen Category: Best Current Practice G. Shepherd ISSN: 2070-1721 Cisco Systems March 2017 UDP Usage GuidelinesAbstract
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 Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), Differentiated Services Code Points (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. This document obsoletes RFC 5405 and adds guidelines for multicast UDP usage.
Status of This Memo This memo documents an Internet Best Current Practice. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on BCPs is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8085. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2017 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 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. Terminology .....................................................5 3. UDP Usage Guidelines ............................................5 3.1. Congestion Control Guidelines ..............................6 3.2. Message Size Guidelines ...................................19 3.3. Reliability Guidelines ....................................21 3.4. Checksum Guidelines .......................................22 3.5. Middlebox Traversal Guidelines ............................25 3.6. Limited Applicability and Controlled Environments .........27 4. Multicast UDP Usage Guidelines .................................28 4.1. Multicast Congestion Control Guidelines ...................30 4.2. Message Size Guidelines for Multicast .....................32 5. Programming Guidelines .........................................32 5.1. Using UDP Ports ...........................................34 5.2. ICMP Guidelines ...........................................37 6. Security Considerations ........................................38 7. Summary ........................................................40 8. References .....................................................42 8.1. Normative References ......................................42 8.2. Informative References ....................................43 Appendix A. .......................................................53 Acknowledgments ...................................................55 Authors' Addresses ................................................551. Introduction
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) [RFC768] provides a minimal, unreliable, best-effort, message-passing transport to applications and other protocols (such as tunnels) that wish to operate over IP. Both are simply called "applications" in the remainder of this document. Compared to other transport protocols, UDP and its UDP-Lite variant [RFC3828] are unique in that they do not establish end-to-end connections between communicating end systems. UDP communication consequently does not incur connection establishment and teardown overheads, and there is minimal associated end-system state. Because of these characteristics, UDP can offer a very efficient communication transport to some applications. A second unique characteristic of UDP is that it provides no inherent congestion control mechanisms. On many platforms, applications can send UDP datagrams at the line rate of the platform's link interface, which is often much greater than the available end-to-end path capacity, and doing so contributes to congestion along the path. [RFC2914] describes the best current practice for congestion control
in the Internet. It identifies two major reasons why congestion
control mechanisms are critical for the stable operation of the
Internet:
1. The prevention of congestion collapse, i.e., a state where an
increase in network load results in a decrease in useful work
done by the network.
2. The establishment of a degree of fairness, i.e., allowing
multiple flows to share the capacity of a path reasonably
equitably.
Because UDP itself provides no congestion control mechanisms, it is
up to the applications that use UDP for Internet communication to
employ suitable mechanisms to prevent congestion collapse and
establish a degree of fairness. [RFC2309] discusses the dangers of
congestion-unresponsive flows and states that "all UDP-based
streaming applications should incorporate effective congestion
avoidance mechanisms." [RFC7567] reaffirms this statement. This is
an important requirement, even for applications that do not use UDP
for streaming. In addition, congestion-controlled transmission is of
benefit to an application itself, because it can reduce self-induced
packet loss, minimize retransmissions, and hence reduce delays.
Congestion control is essential even at relatively slow transmission
rates. For example, an application that generates five 1500-byte UDP
datagrams in one second can already exceed the capacity of a 56 Kb/s
path. For applications that can operate at higher, potentially
unbounded data rates, congestion control becomes vital to prevent
congestion collapse and establish some degree of fairness. Section 3
describes a number of simple guidelines for the designers of such
applications.
A UDP datagram is carried in a single IP packet and is hence limited
to a maximum payload of 65,507 bytes for IPv4 and 65,527 bytes for
IPv6. The transmission of large IP packets usually requires IP
fragmentation. Fragmentation decreases communication reliability and
efficiency and should be avoided. IPv6 allows the option of
transmitting large packets ("jumbograms") without fragmentation when
all link layers along the path support this [RFC2675]. Some of the
guidelines in Section 3 describe how applications should determine
appropriate message sizes. Other sections of this document provide
guidance on reliability, checksums, middlebox traversal and use of
multicast.
This document provides guidelines and recommendations. Although most
UDP applications are expected to follow these guidelines, there do
exist valid reasons why a specific application may decide not to
follow a given guideline. In such cases, it is RECOMMENDED that
application designers cite the respective section(s) of this document in the technical specification of their application or protocol and explain their rationale for their design choice. [RFC5405] was scoped to provide guidelines for unicast applications only, whereas this document also provides guidelines for UDP flows that use IP anycast, multicast, broadcast, and applications that use UDP tunnels to support IP flows. Finally, although this document specifically refers to usage of UDP, the spirit of some of its guidelines also applies to other message- passing applications and protocols (specifically on the topics of congestion control, message sizes, and reliability). Examples include signaling, tunnel or control applications that choose to run directly over IP by registering their own IP protocol number with IANA. This document is expected to provide useful background reading to the designers of such applications and protocols.2. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].3. UDP Usage Guidelines
Internet paths can have widely varying characteristics, including transmission delays, available bandwidths, congestion levels, reordering probabilities, supported message sizes, or loss rates. Furthermore, the same Internet path can have very different conditions over time. Consequently, applications that may be used on the Internet MUST NOT make assumptions about specific path characteristics. They MUST instead use mechanisms that let them operate safely under very different path conditions. Typically, this requires conservatively probing the current conditions of the Internet path they communicate over to establish a transmission behavior that it can sustain and that is reasonably fair to other traffic sharing the path. These mechanisms are difficult to implement correctly. For most applications, the use of one of the existing IETF transport protocols is the simplest method of acquiring the required mechanisms. Doing so also avoids issues that protocols using a new IP protocol number face when being deployed over the Internet, where middleboxes that only support TCP and UDP are sometimes present. Consequently, the RECOMMENDED alternative to the UDP usage described in the remainder of this section is the use of an IETF transport protocol such as TCP
[RFC793], Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) [RFC4960], and SCTP Partial Reliability Extension (SCTP-PR) [RFC3758], or Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) [RFC4340] with its different congestion control types [RFC4341][RFC4342][RFC5622], or transport protocols specified by the IETF in the future. (UDP-encapsulated SCTP [RFC6951] and DCCP [RFC6773] can offer support for traversing firewalls and other middleboxes where the native protocols are not supported.) If used correctly, these more fully featured transport protocols are not as "heavyweight" as often claimed. For example, the TCP algorithms have been continuously improved over decades, and they have reached a level of efficiency and correctness that custom application-layer mechanisms will struggle to easily duplicate. In addition, many TCP implementations allow connections to be tuned by an application to its purposes. For example, TCP's "Nagle" algorithm [RFC1122] can be disabled, improving communication latency at the expense of more frequent -- but still congestion controlled -- packet transmissions. Another example is the TCP SYN cookie mechanism [RFC4987], which is available on many platforms. TCP with SYN cookies does not require a server to maintain per-connection state until the connection is established. TCP also requires the end that closes a connection to maintain the TIME-WAIT state that prevents delayed segments from one connection instance from interfering with a later one. Applications that are aware of and designed for this behavior can shift maintenance of the TIME-WAIT state to conserve resources by controlling which end closes a TCP connection [FABER]. Finally, TCP's built-in capacity-probing and awareness of the maximum transmission unit supported by the path (PMTU) results in efficient data transmission that quickly compensates for the initial connection setup delay, in the case of transfers that exchange more than a few segments.3.1. Congestion Control Guidelines
If an application or protocol chooses not to use a congestion- controlled transport protocol, it SHOULD control the rate at which it sends UDP datagrams to a destination host, in order to fulfill the requirements of [RFC2914]. It is important to stress that an application SHOULD perform congestion control over all UDP traffic it sends to a destination, independently from how it generates this traffic. For example, an application that forks multiple worker processes or otherwise uses multiple sockets to generate UDP datagrams SHOULD perform congestion control over the aggregate traffic.
Several approaches to perform congestion control are discussed in the remainder of this section. This section describes generic topics with an intended emphasis on unicast and anycast [RFC1546] usage. Not all approaches discussed below are appropriate for all UDP- transmitting applications. Section 3.1.2 discusses congestion control options for applications that perform bulk transfers over UDP. Such applications can employ schemes that sample the path over several subsequent round-trips during which data is exchanged to determine a sending rate that the path at its current load can support. Other applications only exchange a few UDP datagrams with a destination. Section 3.1.3 discusses congestion control options for such "low data-volume" applications. Because they typically do not transmit enough data to iteratively sample the path to determine a safe sending rate, they need to employ different kinds of congestion control mechanisms. Section 3.1.11 discusses congestion control considerations when UDP is used as a tunneling protocol. Section 4 provides additional recommendations for broadcast and multicast usage. It is important to note that congestion control should not be viewed as an add-on to a finished application. Many of the mechanisms discussed in the guidelines below require application support to operate correctly. Application designers need to consider congestion control throughout the design of their application, similar to how they consider security aspects throughout the design process. In the past, the IETF has also investigated integrated congestion control mechanisms that act on the traffic aggregate between two hosts, i.e., a framework such as the Congestion Manager [RFC3124], where active sessions may share current congestion information in a way that is independent of the transport protocol. Such mechanisms have currently failed to see deployment, but would otherwise simplify the design of congestion control mechanisms for UDP sessions, so that they fulfill the requirements in [RFC2914].3.1.1. Protocol Timer Guidelines
Understanding the latency between communicating endpoints is usually a crucial part of effective congestion control implementations for protocols and applications. Latency estimation can be used in a number of protocol functions, such as calculating a congestion- controlled transmission rate, triggering retransmission, and detecting packet loss. Additional protocol functions, for example, determining an interval for probing a path, determining an interval between keep-alive messages, determining an interval for measuring the quality of experience, or determining if a remote endpoint has
responded to a request to perform an action, typically operate over longer timescales than congestion control and therefore are not covered in this section. The general recommendation in this document is that applications SHOULD leverage existing congestion control techniques and the latency estimators specified therein (see next subsection). The following guidelines are provided for applications that need to design their own latency estimation mechanisms. The guidelines are framed in terms of "latency" and not "round-trip time" because some situations require characterizing only the network-based latency (e.g., TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) [RFC5348]), while other cases necessitate inclusion of the time required by the remote endpoint to provide feedback (e.g., developing an understanding of when to retransmit a message). The latency between endpoints is generally a dynamic property. Therefore, estimates SHOULD represent some sort of averaging of multiple recent measurement samples to account for variance. Leveraging an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) has proven useful for this purpose (e.g., in TCP [RFC6298] and TFRC [RFC5348]). Independent latency estimates SHOULD be maintained for each destination with which an endpoint communicates. Latency samples MUST NOT be derived from ambiguous transactions. The canonical example is in a protocol that retransmits data, but subsequently cannot determine which copy is being acknowledged. This ambiguity makes correct computation of the latency problematic. See the discussion of Karn's algorithm in [RFC6298]. This requirement ensures a sender establishes a sound estimate of the latency without relying on misleading measurements. When a latency estimate is used to arm a timer that provides loss detection -- with or without retransmission -- expiry of the timer MUST be interpreted as an indication of congestion in the network, causing the sending rate to be adapted to a safe conservative rate (e.g., TCP collapses the congestion window to one segment [RFC5681]). Some applications require an initial latency estimate before the latency between endpoints can be empirically sampled. For instance, when arming a retransmission timer, an initial value is needed to protect the messages sent before the endpoints sample the latency. This initial latency estimate SHOULD generally be as conservative (large) as possible for the given application. For instance, in the absence of any knowledge about the latency of a path, TCP requires the initial Retransmission Timeout (RTO) to be set to no less than 1
second [RFC6298]. UDP applications SHOULD similarly use an initial latency estimate of 1 second. Values shorter than 1 second can be problematic (see the data analysis in the appendix of [RFC6298]).3.1.2. Bulk-Transfer Applications
Applications that perform bulk transmission of data to a peer over UDP, i.e., applications that exchange more than a few UDP datagrams per RTT, SHOULD implement TFRC [RFC5348], window-based TCP-like congestion control, or otherwise ensure that the application complies with the congestion control principles. TFRC has been designed to provide both congestion control and fairness in a way that is compatible with the IETF's other transport protocols. If an application implements TFRC, it need not follow the remaining guidelines in Section 3.1.2, because TFRC already addresses them, but it SHOULD still follow the remaining guidelines in the subsequent subsections of Section 3. Bulk-transfer applications that choose not to implement TFRC or TCP- like windowing SHOULD implement a congestion control scheme that results in bandwidth (capacity) use that competes fairly with TCP within an order of magnitude. Section 2 of [RFC3551] suggests that applications SHOULD monitor the packet-loss rate to ensure that it is within acceptable parameters. Packet loss is considered acceptable if a TCP flow across the same network path under the same network conditions would achieve an average throughput, measured on a reasonable timescale, that is not less than that of the UDP flow. The comparison to TCP cannot be specified exactly, but is intended as an "order-of-magnitude" comparison in timescale and throughput. The recommendations for managing timers specified in Section 3.1.1 also apply. Finally, some bulk-transfer applications may choose not to implement any congestion control mechanism and instead rely on transmitting across reserved path capacity (see Section 3.1.9). This might be an acceptable choice for a subset of restricted networking environments, but is by no means a safe practice for operation over the wider Internet. When the UDP traffic of such applications leaks out into unprovisioned Internet paths, it can significantly degrade the performance of other traffic sharing the path and even result in congestion collapse. Applications that support an uncontrolled or unadaptive transmission behavior SHOULD NOT do so by default and SHOULD instead require users to explicitly enable this mode of operation, and they SHOULD verify that sufficient path capacity has been reserved for them.
3.1.3. Low Data-Volume Applications
When applications that at any time exchange only a few UDP datagrams with a destination implement TFRC or one of the other congestion control schemes in Section 3.1.2, the network sees little benefit, because those mechanisms perform congestion control in a way that is only effective for longer transmissions. Applications that at any time exchange only a few UDP datagrams with a destination SHOULD still control their transmission behavior by not sending on average more than one UDP datagram per RTT to a destination. Similar to the recommendation in [RFC1536], an application SHOULD maintain an estimate of the RTT for any destination with which it communicates using the methods specified in Section 3.1.1. Some applications cannot maintain a reliable RTT estimate for a destination. These applications do not need to or are unable to use protocol timers to measure the RTT (Section 3.1.1). Two cases can be identified: 1. The first case is that of applications that exchange too few UDP datagrams with a peer to establish a statistically accurate RTT estimate but that can monitor the reliability of transmission (Section 3.3). Such applications MAY use a predetermined transmission interval that is exponentially backed off when packets are deemed lost. TCP specifies an initial value of 1 second [RFC6298], which is also RECOMMENDED as an initial value for UDP applications. Some low data-volume applications, e.g., SIP [RFC3261] and General Internet Signaling Transport (GIST) [RFC5971] use an interval of 500 ms, and shorter values are likely problematic in many cases. As in the previous case, note that the initial timeout is not the maximum possible timeout, see Section 3.1.1. 2. A second case of applications cannot maintain an RTT estimate for a destination, because the destination does not send return traffic. Such applications SHOULD NOT send more than one UDP datagram every 3 seconds and SHOULD use an even less aggressive rate when possible. Shorter values are likely problematic in many cases. Note that the sending rate in this case must be more conservative than in the previous cases, because the lack of return traffic prevents the detection of packet loss, i.e., congestion, and the application therefore cannot perform exponential back off to reduce load.
3.1.4. Applications Supporting Bidirectional Communications
Applications that communicate bidirectionally SHOULD employ congestion control for both directions of the communication. For example, for a client-server, request-response-style application, clients SHOULD congestion-control their request transmission to a server, and the server SHOULD congestion-control its responses to the clients. Congestion in the forward and reverse directions is uncorrelated, and an application SHOULD either independently detect and respond to congestion along both directions or limit new and retransmitted requests based on acknowledged responses across the entire round-trip path.3.1.5. Implications of RTT and Loss Measurements on Congestion Control
Transports such as TCP, SCTP, and DCCP provide timely detection of congestion that results in an immediate reduction of their maximum sending rate when congestion is experienced. This reaction is typically completed 1-2 RTTs after loss/congestion is encountered. Applications using UDP SHOULD implement a congestion control scheme that provides a prompt reaction to signals indicating congestion (e.g., by reducing the rate within the next RTT following a congestion signal). The operation of a UDP congestion control algorithm can be very different from the way TCP operates. This includes congestion controls that respond on timescales that fit applications that cannot usefully work within the "change rate every RTT" model of TCP. Applications that experience a low or varying RTT are particularly vulnerable to sampling errors (e.g., due to measurement noise or timer accuracy). This suggests the need to average loss/congestion and RTT measurements over a longer interval; however, this also can contribute additional delay in detecting congestion. Some applications may not react by reducing their sending rate immediately for various reasons, including the following: RTT and loss measurements are only made periodically (e.g., using RTCP), additional time is required to filter information, or the application is only able to change its sending rate at predetermined interval (e.g., some video codecs). When designing a congestion control algorithm, the designer therefore needs to consider the total time taken to reduce the load following a lack of feedback or a congestion event. An application where the most recent RTT measurement is smaller than the actual RTT or the measured loss rate is smaller than the current rate, can result in over estimating the available capacity. Such over-estimation can
result in a sending rate that creates congestion to the application or other flows sharing the path capacity, and can contribute to congestion collapse -- both of these need to be avoided. A congestion control designed for UDP SHOULD respond as quickly as possible when it experiences congestion, and it SHOULD take into account both the loss rate and the response time when choosing a new rate. The implemented congestion control scheme SHOULD result in bandwidth (capacity) use that is comparable to that of TCP within an order of magnitude, so that it does not starve other flows sharing a common bottleneck.3.1.6. Burst Mitigation and Pacing
UDP applications SHOULD provide mechanisms to regulate the bursts of transmission that the application may send to the network. Many TCP and SCTP implementations provide mechanisms that prevent a sender from generating long bursts at line-rate, since these are known to induce early loss to applications sharing a common network bottleneck. The use of pacing with TCP [ALLMAN] has also been shown to improve the coexistence of TCP flows with other flows. The need to avoid excessive transmission bursts is also noted in specifications for applications (e.g., [RFC7143]). Even low data-volume UDP flows may benefit from packet pacing, e.g., an application that sends three copies of a packet to improve robustness to loss is RECOMMENDED to pace out those three packets over several RTTs, to reduce the probability that all three packets will be lost due to the same congestion event (or other event, such as burst corruption).3.1.7. Explicit Congestion Notification
Internet applications can use Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) [RFC3168] to gain benefits for the services they support [RFC8087]. Internet transports, such as TCP, provide a set of mechanisms that are needed to utilize ECN. ECN operates by setting an ECN-capable codepoint (ECT(0) or ECT(1)) in the IP header of packets that are sent. This indicates to ECN-capable network devices (routers and other devices) that they may mark (set the congestion experienced, Congestion Experience (CE) codepoint) rather than drop the IP packet as a signal of incipient congestion. UDP applications can also benefit from enabling ECN, providing that the API supports ECN and that they implement the required protocol mechanisms to support ECN.
The set of mechanisms required for an application to use ECN over UDP
are:
o A sender MUST provide a method to determine (e.g., negotiate) that
the corresponding application is able to provide ECN feedback
using a compatible ECN method.
o A receiver that enables the use of ECN for a UDP port MUST check
the ECN field at the receiver for each UDP datagram that it
receives on this port.
o The receiving application needs to provide feedback of congestion
information to the sending application. This MUST report the
presence of datagrams received with a CE-mark by providing a
mechanism to feed this congestion information back to the sending
application. The feedback MAY also report the presence of ECT(1)
and ECT(0)/Not-ECT packets [RFC7560]. ([RFC3168] and [RFC7560]
specify methods for TCP.)
o An application sending ECN-capable datagrams MUST provide an
appropriate congestion reaction when it receives feedback
indicating that congestion has been experienced. This ought to
result in reduction of the sending rate by the UDP congestion
control method (see Section 3.1) that is not less than the
reaction of TCP under equivalent conditions.
o A sender SHOULD detect network paths that do not support the ECN
field correctly. When detected, they need to either
conservatively react to congestion or even fall back to not using
ECN [RFC8087]. This method needs to be robust to changes within
the network path that may occur over the lifetime of a session.
o A sender is encouraged to provide a mechanism to detect and react
appropriately to misbehaving receivers that fail to report
CE-marked packets [RFC8087].
[RFC6679] provides guidance and an example of this support, by
describing a method to allow ECN to be used for UDP-based
applications using the Real-Time Protocol (RTP). Applications that
cannot provide this set of mechanisms, but wish to gain the benefits
of using ECN, are encouraged to use a transport protocol that already
supports ECN (such as TCP).
3.1.8. Differentiated Services Model
An application using UDP can use the differentiated services
(DiffServ) Quality of Service (QoS) framework. To enable
differentiated services processing, a UDP sender sets the
Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) field [RFC2475] in packets sent to the network. Normally, a UDP source/destination port pair will set a single DSCP value for all packets belonging to a flow, but multiple DSCPs can be used as described later in this section. A DSCP may be chosen from a small set of fixed values (the class selector code points), or from a set of recommended values defined in the Per Hop Behavior (PHB) specifications, or from values that have purely local meanings to a specific network that supports DiffServ. In general, packets may be forwarded across multiple networks between source and destination. In setting a non-default DSCP value, an application must be aware that DSCP markings may be changed or removed between the traffic source and destination. This has implications on the design of applications that use DSCPs. Specifically, applications SHOULD be designed not to rely on implementation of a specific network treatment; they need instead to implement congestion control methods to determine if their current sending rate is inducing congestion in the network. [RFC7657] describes the implications of using DSCPs and provides recommendations on using multiple DSCPs within a single network five- tuple (source and destination addresses, source and destination ports, and the transport protocol used, in this case, UDP or UDP-Lite), and particularly the expected impact on transport protocol interactions, with congestion control or reliability functionality (e.g., retransmission, reordering). Use of multiple DSCPs can result in reordering by increasing the set of network forwarding resources used by a sender. It can also increase exposure to resource depletion or failure.3.1.9. QoS, Pre-Provisioned, or Reserved Capacity
The IETF usually specifies protocols for use within the Best Effort General Internet. Sometimes it is relevant to specify protocols with a different applicability. An application using UDP can use the integrated services QoS framework. This framework is usually made available within controlled environments (e.g., within a single administrative domain or bilaterally agreed connection between domains). Applications intended for the Internet SHOULD NOT assume that QoS mechanisms are supported by the networks they use, and therefore need to provide congestion control, error recovery, etc., in case the actual network path does not provide provisioned service. Some UDP applications are only expected to be deployed over network paths that use pre-provisioned capacity or capacity reserved using dynamic provisioning, e.g., through the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP). Multicast applications are also used with pre-provisioned
capacity (e.g., IPTV deployments within access networks). These applications MAY choose not to implement any congestion control mechanism and instead rely on transmitting only on paths where the capacity is provisioned and reserved for this use. This might be an acceptable choice for a subset of restricted networking environments, but is by no means a safe practice for operation over the wider Internet. Applications that choose this option SHOULD carefully and in detail describe the provisioning and management procedures that result in the desired containment. Applications that support an uncontrolled or unadaptive transmission behavior SHOULD NOT do so by default and SHOULD instead require users to explicitly enable this mode of operation. Applications designed for use within a controlled environment (see Section 3.6) may be able to exploit network management functions to detect whether they are causing congestion, and react accordingly. If the traffic of such applications leaks out into unprovisioned Internet paths, it can significantly degrade the performance of other traffic sharing the path and even result in congestion collapse. Protocols designed for such networks SHOULD provide mechanisms at the network edge to prevent leakage of traffic into unprovisioned Internet paths (e.g., [RFC7510]). To protect other applications sharing the same path, applications SHOULD also deploy an appropriate circuit breaker, as described in Section 3.1.10. An IETF specification targeting a controlled environment is expected to provide an applicability statement that restricts the application to the controlled environment (see Section 3.6).3.1.10. Circuit Breaker Mechanisms
A transport circuit breaker is an automatic mechanism that is used to estimate the congestion caused by a flow, and to terminate (or significantly reduce the rate of) the flow when excessive congestion is detected [RFC8084]. This is a safety measure to prevent congestion collapse (starvation of resources available to other flows), essential for an Internet that is heterogeneous and for traffic that is hard to predict in advance. A circuit breaker is intended as a protection mechanism of last resort. Under normal circumstances, a circuit breaker should not be triggered; it is designed to protect things when there is severe overload. The goal is usually to limit the maximum transmission rate that reflects the available capacity of a network path. Circuit breakers can operate on individual UDP flows or traffic aggregates, e.g., traffic sent using a network tunnel.
[RFC8084] provides guidance and examples on the use of circuit breakers. The use of a circuit breaker in RTP is specified in [RFC8083]. Applications used in the general Internet SHOULD implement a transport circuit breaker if they do not implement congestion control or operate a low data-volume service (see Section 3.6). All applications MAY implement a transport circuit breaker [RFC8084] and are encouraged to consider implementing at least a slow-acting transport circuit breaker to provide a protection of last resort for their network traffic.3.1.11. UDP Tunnels
One increasingly popular use of UDP is as a tunneling protocol [INT-TUNNELS], where a tunnel endpoint encapsulates the packets of another protocol inside UDP datagrams and transmits them to another tunnel endpoint, which decapsulates the UDP datagrams and forwards the original packets contained in the payload. One example of such a protocol is Teredo [RFC4380]. Tunnels establish virtual links that appear to directly connect locations that are distant in the physical Internet topology and can be used to create virtual (private) networks. Using UDP as a tunneling protocol is attractive when the payload protocol is not supported by middleboxes that may exist along the path, because many middleboxes support transmission using UDP. Well-implemented tunnels are generally invisible to the endpoints that happen to transmit over a path that includes tunneled links. On the other hand, to the routers along the path of a UDP tunnel, i.e., the routers between the two tunnel endpoints, the traffic that a UDP tunnel generates is a regular UDP flow, and the encapsulator and decapsulator appear as regular UDP-sending and UDP-receiving applications. Because other flows can share the path with one or more UDP tunnels, congestion control needs to be considered. Two factors determine whether a UDP tunnel needs to employ specific congestion control mechanisms: first, whether the payload traffic is IP-based; and second, whether the tunneling scheme generates UDP traffic at a volume that corresponds to the volume of payload traffic carried within the tunnel. IP-based unicast traffic is generally assumed to be congestion controlled, i.e., it is assumed that the transport protocols generating IP-based unicast traffic at the sender already employ mechanisms that are sufficient to address congestion on the path. Consequently, a tunnel carrying IP-based unicast traffic should
already interact appropriately with other traffic sharing the path, and specific congestion control mechanisms for the tunnel are not necessary. However, if the IP traffic in the tunnel is known not to be congestion controlled, additional measures are RECOMMENDED to limit the impact of the tunneled traffic on other traffic sharing the path. For the specific case of a tunnel that carries IP multicast traffic, see Section 4.1. The following guidelines define these possible cases in more detail: 1. A tunnel generates UDP traffic at a volume that corresponds to the volume of payload traffic, and the payload traffic is IP based and congestion controlled. This is arguably the most common case for Internet tunnels. In this case, the UDP tunnel SHOULD NOT employ its own congestion control mechanism, because congestion losses of tunneled traffic will already trigger an appropriate congestion response at the original senders of the tunneled traffic. A circuit breaker mechanism may provide benefit by controlling the envelope of the aggregated traffic. Note that this guideline is built on the assumption that most IP-based communication is congestion controlled. If a UDP tunnel is used for IP-based traffic that is known to not be congestion controlled, the next set of guidelines applies. 2. A tunnel generates UDP traffic at a volume that corresponds to the volume of payload traffic, and the payload traffic is not known to be IP based, or is known to be IP based but not congestion controlled. This can be the case, for example, when some link-layer protocols are encapsulated within UDP (but not all link-layer protocols; some are congestion controlled). Because it is not known that congestion losses of tunneled non-IP traffic will trigger an appropriate congestion response at the senders, the UDP tunnel SHOULD employ an appropriate congestion control mechanism or circuit breaker mechanism designed for the traffic it carries. Because tunnels are usually bulk-transfer applications as far as the intermediate routers are concerned, the guidelines in Section 3.1.2 apply. 3. A tunnel generates UDP traffic at a volume that does not correspond to the volume of payload traffic, independent of whether the payload traffic is IP based or congestion controlled.
Examples of this class include UDP tunnels that send at a
constant rate, increase their transmission rates under loss, for
example, due to increasing redundancy when Forward Error
Correction is used, or are otherwise unconstrained in their
transmission behavior. These specialized uses of UDP for
tunneling go beyond the scope of the general guidelines given in
this document. The implementer of such specialized tunnels
SHOULD carefully consider congestion control in the design of
their tunneling mechanism and SHOULD consider use of a circuit
breaker mechanism.
The type of encapsulated payload might be identified by a UDP port;
identified by an Ethernet Type or IP protocol number. A tunnel
SHOULD provide mechanisms to restrict the types of flows that may be
carried by the tunnel. For instance, a UDP tunnel designed to carry
IP needs to filter out non-IP traffic at the ingress. This is
particularly important when a generic tunnel encapsulation is used
(e.g., one that encapsulates using an EtherType value). Such tunnels
SHOULD provide a mechanism to restrict the types of traffic that are
allowed to be encapsulated for a given deployment (see
[INT-TUNNELS]).
Designing a tunneling mechanism requires significantly more expertise
than needed for many other UDP applications, because tunnels are
usually intended to be transparent to the endpoints transmitting over
them, so they need to correctly emulate the behavior of an IP link
[INT-TUNNELS], for example:
o Requirements for tunnels that carry or encapsulate using ECN code
points [RFC6040].
o Usage of the IP DSCP field by tunnel endpoints [RFC2983].
o Encapsulation considerations in the design of tunnels [ENCAP].
o Usage of ICMP messages [INT-TUNNELS].
o Handling of fragmentation and packet size for tunnels
[INT-TUNNELS].
o Source port usage for tunnels designed to support equal cost
multipath (ECMP) routing (see Section 5.1.1).
o Guidance on the need to protect headers [INT-TUNNELS] and the use
of checksums for IPv6 tunnels (see Section 3.4.1).
o Support for operations and maintenance [INT-TUNNELS].
At the same time, the tunneled traffic is application traffic like any other from the perspective of the networks the tunnel transmits over. This document only touches upon the congestion control considerations for implementing UDP tunnels; a discussion of other required tunneling behavior is out of scope.3.2. Message Size Guidelines
IP fragmentation lowers the efficiency and reliability of Internet communication. The loss of a single fragment results in the loss of an entire fragmented packet, because even if all other fragments are received correctly, the original packet cannot be reassembled and delivered. This fundamental issue with fragmentation exists for both IPv4 and IPv6. In addition, some network address translators (NATs) and firewalls drop IP fragments. The network address translation performed by a NAT only operates on complete IP packets, and some firewall policies also require inspection of complete IP packets. Even with these being the case, some NATs and firewalls simply do not implement the necessary reassembly functionality; instead, they choose to drop all fragments. Finally, [RFC4963] documents other issues specific to IPv4 fragmentation. Due to these issues, an application SHOULD NOT send UDP datagrams that result in IP packets that exceed the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) along the path to the destination. Consequently, an application SHOULD either use the path MTU information provided by the IP layer or implement Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) itself [RFC1191] [RFC1981] [RFC4821] to determine whether the path to a destination will support its desired message size without fragmentation. However, the ICMP messages that enable path MTU discovery are being increasingly filtered by middleboxes (including Firewalls) [RFC4890]. When the path includes a tunnel, some devices acting as a tunnel ingress discard ICMP messages that originate from network devices over which the tunnel passes, preventing these from reaching the UDP endpoint. Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery (PLPMTUD) [RFC4821] does not rely upon network support for ICMP messages and is therefore considered more robust than standard PMTUD. It is not susceptible to "black holing" of ICMP messages. To operate, PLPMTUD requires changes to the way the transport is used: both to transmit probe packets and to account for the loss or success of these probes. This not only updates the PMTU algorithm, it also impacts loss recovery, congestion control, etc. These updated mechanisms can be implemented
within a connection-oriented transport (e.g., TCP, SCTP, DCCP), but they are not a part of UDP; this type of feedback is not typically present for unidirectional applications. Therefore, PLPMTUD places additional design requirements on a UDP application that wishes to use this method. This is especially true for UDP tunnels, because the overhead of sending probe packets needs to be accounted for and may require adding a congestion control mechanism to the tunnel (see Section 3.1.11) as well as complicating the data path at a tunnel decapsulator. Applications that do not follow the recommendation to do PMTU/PLPMTUD discovery SHOULD still avoid sending UDP datagrams that would result in IP packets that exceed the path MTU. Because the actual path MTU is unknown, such applications SHOULD fall back to sending messages that are shorter than the default effective MTU for sending (EMTU_S in [RFC1122]). For IPv4, EMTU_S is the smaller of 576 bytes and the first-hop MTU [RFC1122]. For IPv6, EMTU_S is 1280 bytes [RFC2460]. The effective PMTU for a directly connected destination (with no routers on the path) is the configured interface MTU, which could be less than the maximum link payload size. Transmission of minimum- sized UDP datagrams is inefficient over paths that support a larger PMTU, which is a second reason to implement PMTU discovery. To determine an appropriate UDP payload size, applications MUST subtract the size of the IP header (which includes any IPv4 optional headers or IPv6 extension headers) as well as the length of the UDP header (8 bytes) from the PMTU size. This size, known as the Maximum Segment Size (MSS), can be obtained from the TCP/IP stack [RFC1122]. Applications that do not send messages that exceed the effective PMTU of IPv4 or IPv6 need not implement any of the above mechanisms. Note that the presence of tunnels can cause an additional reduction of the effective PMTU [INT-TUNNELS], so implementing PMTU discovery may be beneficial. Applications that fragment an application-layer message into multiple UDP datagrams SHOULD perform this fragmentation so that each datagram can be received independently, and be independently retransmitted in the case where an application implements its own reliability mechanisms.
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