IP Parcels

IP packets (both IPv4 and IPv6 ) are understood to contain a unit of data which becomes the retransmission unit in case of loss. Upper layer protocols such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) , QUIC , LTP and others prepare data units known as "segments", with traditional arrangements including a single segment per packet. This document presents a new construct known as the "IP Parcel" which permits a single packet to carry multiple segments. This essentially creates a "packet-of-packets" with the IP layer headers appearing only once but with possibly multiple upper layer protocol segments. Parcels are formed when an upper layer protocol entity (identified by the "5-tuple" source IP address/port number, destination IP address/port number and protocol number) prepares a buffer of data with the concatenation of up to 64 properly-formed segments that can be broken out into smaller parcels using a copy of the IP header. All segments except the final segment must be equal in size and no larger than 65535 (minus headers), while the final segment must be no larger than the others but may be smaller. The upper layer protocol entity then delivers the buffer and non-final segment size to the IP layer, which appends the necessary IP headers to identify this as a parcel and not an ordinary packet. Each parcel can be opened at a first-hop middlebox on the path with its included segments broken out into smaller parcels, then rejoined into one or more parcels at a last-hop middlebox to be forwarded to the final destination. Repackaging of parcels is therefore commonplace, while reordering of segments within a parcel or loss of individual segments is possible but not desirable. But, what matters is that the number of parcels delivered to the final destination should be kept to a minimum, and that loss or receipt of individual segments (and not parcel size) determines the retransmission unit. The following sections discuss rationale for creating and shipping parcels as well as the actual protocol constructs and procedures involved. It is expected that the parcel concept may drive future innovation in applications, operating systems, network equipment and data links.

A "parcel" is defined as "a thing or collection of things wrapped in paper in order to be carried or sent by mail". Indeed, there are many examples of parcel delivery services worldwide that provide an essential transit backbone for efficient business and consumer transactions. In this same spirit, an "IP parcel" is simply a collection of up to 64 packets wrapped in an efficient package for transmission and delivery (i.e., a "packet of packets") while a "singleton IP parcel" is simply a parcel that contains a single packet. IP parcels are distinguished from ordinary packets through the special header constructions discussed in this document. 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 BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Studies have shown that by sending and receiving larger packets applications can realize greater performance due to reduced numbers of system calls and interrupts as well as larger atomic data copies between kernel and user space. Within edge networks, large packets also result in reduced numbers of device interrupts and better network utilization in comparison with smaller packet sizes. A first study involved performance enhancement of the QUIC protocol using the Generic Segment/Receive Offload (GSO/GRO) facility . GSO/GRO provide a robust (but non-standard) service very similar in nature to the IP parcel service described here, and its application has shown significant performance increases due to the increased transfer unit size between the operating system kernel and QUIC application. A second study showed that GSO/GRO also improved performance for the Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) in a similar fashion . Historically, the NFS protocol also saw dramatic performance increases when using larger UDP datagram sizes even when those sizes invoked IP fragmentation. TCP also benefits from larger packet sizes and efforts have investigated TCP performance using jumbograms internally with changes to the linux GSO/GRO facilities . The idea is to use the jumbo payload internally and to allow GSO and GRO to use buffer sizes larger than just ~64KB, but with the understanding that links that support jumbos natively are not yet widely available. Hence, IP parcels provides a packaging that can be considered in the near term under current deployment limitations. The issue with sending large packets is that they are often lost at links with smaller Maximum Transmission Units (MTUs), and the resulting Packet Too Big (PTB) message may be lost somewhere in the path back to the original source. This "Path MTU black hole" condition can cripple application performance unless also supplemented with robust path probing techniques, however the best case performance always occurs when no packets are lost due to size restrictions. These considerations therefore motivate a design where the maximum segment size should be no larger than 65535 (minus headers), while parcels that carry the segments may themselves be significantly larger. Then, even if a middlebox needs to open the parcels to deliver individual segments further toward final hops as separate IP packets, an important performance optimization for both the original source and final destination can be realized. An analogy: when a consumer orders 50 small items from a major online retailer, the retailer does not ship the order in 50 separate small boxes. Instead, the retailer puts as many of the small boxes as possible into one or a few larger boxes (or parcels) then places the parcels on a semi-truck or airplane. The parcels arrive at a regional distribution center where they may be further redistributed into slightly smaller parcels that get delivered to the consumer. But most often, the consumer will only find one or a few parcels at his doorstep and not 50 individual boxes. This greatly reduces handling overhead for both the retailer and consumer.

IP parcel formation is invoked by an upper layer protocol (identified by the 5-tuple as above) when it produces a data buffer containing the concatenation of up to 64 segments. All non-final segments MUST be equal in length while the final segment MUST NOT be larger but MAY be smaller. Each non-final segment MUST be no larger than 65535 minus the length of the IP header plus extensions, minus the length of an additional IPv6 header in case encapsulation is necessary (see: ). The upper layer protocol then presents the buffer and non-final segment size to the IP layer which appends a single IP header (plus any extension headers) before presenting the parcel to lower layers. For IPv4, the IP layer prepares the parcel by appending an IPv4 header with a Jumbo Payload option (identified by option code TBD1) formed as follows:

where "Jumbo Payload Length" is a 32-bit unsigned integer value (in network byte order) set to the lengths of the IPv4 header plus all concatenated segments. The IP layer next sets the IPv4 header DF bit to 1, then sets the IPv4 header Total Length field to the length of the IPv4 header plus the length of the first segment only. Note that the IP layer can form true IPv4 jumbograms (as opposed to parcels) by instead setting the IPv4 header Total Length field to 0 (see: ). For IPv6, the IP layer forms a parcel by appending an IPv6 header with a Jumbo Payload option the same as for IPv4 above where "Jumbo Payload Length" is set to the lengths of the IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Options header and any other extension headers present plus all concatenated segments. The IP layer next sets the IPv6 header Payload Length field to the lengths of the IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Options header and any other extension headers present plus the length of the first segment only. As with IPv4 the IP layer can form true IPv6 jumbograms (as opposed to parcels) by instead setting the IPv6 header Payload Length field to 0 (see: ). An IP parcel therefore has the following appearance:

where J is the total number of segments (between 1 and 64), L is the length of each non-final segment which MUST be no larger than 65535 minus the length of the IP header plus extensions, minus the length of an additional IPv6 header in case encapsulation is necessary, and K is the length of the final segment which MUST be no larger than L. The values M and N are then set to the length of the IP header plus extensions for IPv4 or to the length of the extensions only for IPv6, then further calculated as follows: M = M + ((J - 1) ? L : K) N = N + (((J -1) * L) + K) Note a NULL parcel consisting of only the IP header plus extensions is also a legal parcel. In that case, J is 0 and the above segment length calculation is omitted.

The IP layer next presents the parcel to the outgoing network interface. For OMNI interfaces , the OMNI Adaptation Layer (OAL) source sub-divides the parcel into smaller parcels if necessary then forwards these smaller parcels into the OMNI link. (The smallest subdivision possible is a singleton where J in the above equation is 1, in which case M and N become equal.) These smaller parcels eventually arrive at the OAL destination which may re-combine them into a larger parcel or parcels to forward to the final destination. Details for OAL parcel processing are discussed in . For ordinary network interfaces, the IP layer instead forwards the parcel according to the path MTU to either an OAL source or the final destination itself, whichever comes first. If the parcel is no larger than the path MTU, the IP layer simply forwards the parcel the same as it would an ordinary IP packet and processes any PTB messages that may arrive while first applying encapsulation if necessary (see: ). If the parcel is larger than 65535 (minus encapsulation headers) and also larger than the path MTU, the IP layer instead discards the parcel and returns a packet size error to the upper layer protocol or a PTB to the original source. If the parcel is no larger than 65535 (minus encapsulation headers) but larger than the path MTU, the IP layer instead performs IP encapsulation with destination set to the IP address of the OAL source or final destination and [Total, Payload] Length set to N plus the encapsulation header length. The IP layer then performs source-fragmentation on the encapsulated parcel the same as for an ordinary IP packet by generating IP fragments destined for the OAL source or final destination. When the OAL source or final destination receives the fragments or whole parcels, it reassembles if necessary, discards the encapsulation headers then presents the parcel to the OMNI link in the first case or the upper layer protocol in the second case.

Legacy networking gear that forwards parcels over ordinary data links may fail to recognize the new Jumbo Payload extension header coding and instead act only on the [Total, Payload] Length field value. In that case, the legacy gear would likely forward only the IP header plus first segment while truncating the remainder of the parcel. In networks where compatibility is thought to be an issue, the original source can perform encapsulation on parcels uniformly whether or not fragmentation is necessary to ensure they are delivered to the OAL source or final destination (whichever comes first). In the same way the OAL destination can uniformly perform encapsulation to ensure that parcels are delivered to the final destination. When the original source or OAL destination applies encapsulation, it sets the encapsulation header [Total, Payload] Length to N plus the encapsulation header length if that value is no larger than 65535. Otherwise, it sets [Total, Payload] Length to 0 and MUST include a Jumbo Payload option with the encapsulation header with the length set to N plus the encapsulation header length.

TCP peers that wish to employ IP parcels must negotiate their use upon connection establishment by including the Parcel-Permitted option. This two-byte option may be sent in a SYN by a TCP that has been extended to receive (and presumably process) IP parcels once the connection has opened. It MUST NOT be sent on non-SYN segments. The TCP option has the following format:

A TCP that includes the Parcel-Permitted option MUST be capable of reassembling the maximum-length encapsulated parcel that can undergo fragmentation (see: and ). Note: the TCP protocol is currently under revision for second edition RFC publication . An investigation of the applicability of IP parcels for the second edition publication is recommended.

Parcels can range in length from as small as only the IP header sizes to as large as the IP headers plus (64 * (2**16 minus headers)) octets. Although link layer integrity checks provide sufficient protection for contiguous data blocks up to approximately 9KB, reliance on the presence of link-layer integrity checks may not be possible over links such as tunnels. Moreover, the segment contents of a received parcel may arrive in an incomplete and/or rearranged order with respect to their original packaging. For these reasons, upper layers must include individual integrity checks with each segment included in the parcel with a strength compatible with the segment length. The integrity check must then be verified at the receiver on a per-segment basis, which discards any corrupted segments and considers them as a loss event.

Section 3 of provides a list of certain conditions to be considered as errors. In particular: error: IPv6 Payload Length != 0 and Jumbo Payload option present error: Jumbo Payload option present and Jumbo Payload Length < 65,536 Implementations that obey this specification ignore these conditions and do not consider them as errors.

By defining a new IPv4 Jumbo Payload option, this document also implicitly enables an IPv4 jumbogram service defined as an IPv4 packet with Total Length set to 0 and with a Jumbo Payload option in the IPv4 extension headers. All aspects of IPv4 jumbograms (including length determination for upper layer protocols) follow exactly the same as for IPv6 jumbograms as specified in .

Common widely-deployed implementations include services such as TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and Generic Segmentation/Receive Offload (GSO/GRO). These services support a robust (but not standardized) service that has been shown to improve performance in many instances. Implementation of the IP parcel service is a work in progress.

The IANA is instructed to allocate a new IP option code in the 'ip option numbers' registry for the "JUMBO - IPv4 Jumbo Payload" option. The Copy and Class fields must both be set to 0, and the Number and Value fields must both be set to 'TBD1 (to be assigned by IANA)'. The reference must be set to this document (RFCXXXX). The IANA is instructed to allocate a new TCP Option Kind Number in the 'tcp-parameters' registry for the "IP Parcel Permitted" option. The Kind must be set to 'TBD2' (to be assigned by IANA) and the Length must be set to 2. The reference must be set to this document (RFCXXXX).

Communications networking security is necessary to preserve confidentiality, integrity and availability.

This work was inspired by ongoing AERO/OMNI/DTN investigations. The concepts were further motivated through discussions on the intarea list. A considerable body of work over recent years has produced useful "segmentation offload" facilities available in widely-deployed implementations. .