Hi Joe,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Touch [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2016 9:34 AM
> To: Templin, Fred L <[email protected]>; Tom Herbert 
> <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [Int-area] Call for adoption of draft-xu-intarea-ip-in-udp-03
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/26/2016 9:16 AM, Templin, Fred L wrote:
> >>>> There is an existing solution to the same problem. GUE allows
> >>>> encapsulation of IPv4 and IPv6, as well as other IP protocols (the GUE
> >>>> header indicates encapsulated protocol by IP number). The only
> >>>> material between GUE encapsulation of IP and IP in UDP is additional
> >>>> four byte header and associated processing of that. I don't think
> >>>> we've seen a use case where avoiding that overhead is critical
> >>>> motivation.
> >>> I thought at one time we had come up with an idea for omitting the GUE
> >>> header when the payload is a plain IPv4/IPv6 packet. There was a check
> >>> of the first four bits following the UDP header to see if they encoded the
> >>> value '4' or '6'. Did that not make it into the draft?
> >>>
> >> Yes, we had come up with the idea and I have implemented the
> >> prototype. It is not in the draft. I believe the only discernible
> >> benefit we could identify was that it saves 4 bytes of overhead. The
> >> major drawback is that this only works specifically for IPv4 and IPv6.
> > I don't see the drawback; I think those two IP protocol versions could
> > carry us forward into the forseeable future. Are you thinking there
> > could be another IP version on the near term horizon?
> 
> IMO, this is a bad idea unless the protocol is specifically limited to
> having IP as a payload. Otherwise, there's no way to ensure that some
> other protocol won't start off with those values.

Tom's proposal unambiguously differentiates raw IPv4 and IPv6 from
all other encapsulations. If it is raw IPv4 or IPv6, the GUE 4-byte header
is not present. Otherwise, the GUE 4-byte header is present.

Thanks - Fred

> In particular, ICMP for IPv4 isn't an IP packet but has no rule about
> the first 4 bits. That field ought to be large enough to handle any
> protocol that might need to share the path with IP.
> 
> Joe

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