The IESG has approved the following document: - 'TCP Fast Open' (draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen-10.txt) as Experimental RFC This document is the product of the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Martin Stiemerling and Spencer Dawkins. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen/ Technical Summary This document describes an experimental TCP mechanism TCP Fast Open (TFO). TFO allows data to be carried in the SYN and SYN-ACK packets and consumed by the receiving end during the initial connection handshake, thus saving up to one full round trip time (RTT) compared to the standard TCP, which requires a three-way handshake (3WHS) to complete before data can be exchanged. However TFO deviates from the standard TCP semantics since the data in the SYN could be replayed to an application in some rare circumstances. Applications should not use TFO unless they can tolerate this issue detailed in the Applicability section. Working Group Summary This document was extensively discussed and reviewed by the TCPM working group and there is strong support to publish the document. While being an experimental document, the TCPM working group decided to ask IESG for approving an IANA allocation of a new TCP option codepoint. Document Quality The protocol extension described in this document is implemented and deployed in the Linux TCP/IP stack, and it is supported by the Chrome Web browser and all Google servers. Experimental results have been discussed in the TCPM working group. An early SECDIR review concluded that the document had no substantive issues. Personnel The Document Shepherd is Michael Scharf <michael.scharf@alcatel-lucent.com>. The Responsible Area Director is Martin Stiemerling <mls.ietf@gmail.com>.
