Hi Arjuna, [snipped] > The obvious question that arises is why does the application send a > zero-length datagram? And why should the DCCP sender send any DCCP-data > packet when the application has nothing to send! So my belief is that > DCCP-data packets have zero length application area has no meaning. [Tom P.] Well, we have an existence proof in the DCCP over RTP spec -- applications with nothing to send want to keep NAT/Firewall pinholes open. There is no information in the packet that the receiver needs to act upon, but middleboxes need to see the traffic. We can argue about which level is the proper place to provide this function... > If we believe that we should not use zero byte DCCP-data packets, then we > could either: > > 1)Have a new option in DCCP-data packets (but we would have nothing in the > application area, so we come back to square 1). > Or > > 2)Have two new DCCP packets called DCCP-Alive and DCCP-AliveResp and the > spec (RFC4340) allows you to have new DCCP packet formats - which looks > more > reasonable to me. [Tom P.] Option 2 sounds more architecturally consistent to me too. Tom P.
