Dear all, I have been looking for a way to store 4G and 5G RAN/Core signaling traces in pcapng. Its lack of support for 5G traces made me abandon gsmtap and focus on the exported_pdu protocol that allows me to specify the dissector to apply and hence can handle any protocol.
The TLV approach for the header/metadata is extremely effective. I am suggesting you extend it to make it support arbitrary application-specific metadata. Inspired by ideas from IPFIX [RFC7011], here is my proposal. Option Code / Tag gets reduced from 16 bits to 15 bits. The skipped bit becomes E, the Enterprise bit. If this bit is zero, the Tag identifies a standard option. If this bit is one, the Tag identifies an enterprise-specific Option, and an Enterprise Number field MUST be present at the beginning of the option value. The Enterprise Number is the IANA enterprise number [IANA-PEN] of the authority defining the Option / Tag and its meaning. This proposal halves the number of available codes for standard options; at the same time, it gives much more flexibility to third parties to include metadata in the header as they can maintain their list of codes and options. Examples: 00 0E 00 08 74 63 70 2e 70 6F 72 74 TAG: 0x000E (14) LEN: 0x0008 (8) VALUE: tcp.port 10 01 00 08 00 00 D2 30 01 02 03 04 E: 1 TAG: 0x0001 (1) LEN: 0x0008 (8) ENTERPRISE: 0x0000D230 (53808) "VIAVI Solutions Inc." DATA (remaining 4 octets): 01 02 03 04 What do you think? Regards, Mauro [RFC7011] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7011>. [IANA-PEN] IANA, "Private Enterprise Numbers", <https://www.iana.org/assignments/enterprise-numbers/>. ___________________________________________________________________________ Sent via: Wireshark-dev mailing list <wireshark-dev@wireshark.org> Archives: https://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev Unsubscribe: https://www.wireshark.org/mailman/options/wireshark-dev mailto:wireshark-dev-requ...@wireshark.org?subject=unsubscribe
