The IESG has received a request from the IPv6 Maintenance WG (6man) to consider the following document: - 'UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets' <draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04.txt> as Proposed Standard The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2012-10-02. Exceptionally, comments may be sent to iesg@ietf.org instead. In either case, please retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting. Abstract This document provides an update of the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) specification (RFC2460) to improve the performance of IPv6 in the use case when a tunnel protocol uses UDP with IPv6 to tunnel packets. The performance improvement is obtained by relaxing the IPv6 UDP checksum requirement for suitable tunneling protocol where header information is protected on the "inner" packet being carried. This relaxation removes the overhead associated with the computation of UDP checksums on IPv6 packets used to carry tunnel protocols and thereby improves the efficiency of the traversal of firewalls and other network middleboxes by such protocols. We describe how the IPv6 UDP checksum requirement can be relaxed in the situation where the encapsulated packet itself contains a checksum, the limitations and risks of this approach, and defines restrictions on the use of this relaxation to mitigate these risks. The file can be obtained via http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums/ IESG discussion can be tracked via http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums/ballot/ No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.
