RFC 3828 (rfc3828) - Page 2 of 12


The Lightweight User Datagram Protocol (UDP-Lite)



Alternative Format: Original Text Document



RFC 3828                   UDP-Lite Protocol                   July 2004


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
   2.  Terminology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   3.  Protocol Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
       3.1.  Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
       3.2.  Pseudo Header. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
       3.3.  Application Interface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
       3.4.  IP Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
       3.5.  Jumbograms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   4.  Lower Layer Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   5.  Compatibility with UDP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   6.  Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   7.  IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   8.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
       8.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
       8.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   9.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   10. Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   11. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

1.  Introduction

   This document describes a new transport protocol, UDP-Lite, (also
   known as UDPLite).  This new protocol is based on three observations:

   First, there is a class of applications that benefit from having
   damaged data delivered rather than discarded by the network.  A
   number of codecs for voice and video fall into this class (e.g., the
   AMR speech codec [RFC-3267], the Internet Low Bit Rate Codec [ILBRC],
   and error resilient H.263+ [ITU-H.263], H.264 [ITU-H.264; H.264], and
   MPEG-4 [ISO-14496] video codecs).  These codecs may be designed to
   cope better with errors in the payload than with loss of entire
   packets.

   Second, all links that support IP transmission should use a strong
   link layer integrity check (e.g., CRC-32 [RFC-3819]), and this MUST
   be used by default for IP traffic.  When the under-lying link
   supports it, certain types of traffic (e.g., UDP-Lite) may benefit
   from a different link behavior that permits partially damaged IP
   packets to be forwarded when requested [RFC-3819].  Several radio
   technologies (e.g., [3GPP]) support this link behavior when operating
   at a point where cost and delay are sufficiently low.  If error-prone
   links are aware of the error sensitive portion of a packet, it is
   also possible for the physical link to provide greater protection to
   reduce the probability of corruption of these error sensitive bytes
   (e.g., the use of unequal Forward Error Correction).




Larzon, et al.              Standards Track