The MPLS WG Archive

["Ong, Lyndon" <LyOng@ciena.com>]

Hi David,

Actually, SCTP is an alternative that supports message
passing and boundary preservation, plus other features
for reliability and detection of signaling path failure.
It was intended to relieve the application from having to
do continual verification of the signaling path and support
of a backup path.  However, it was being defined at about
the same time as MPLS, so it was never considered as an
alternative for transport of MPLS signaling.  

A reliable UDP was one of the alternatives considered when doing
SCTP, but it still leaves the application to do testing
of the signaling path and message rerouting if that fails, 
and does not have congestion control built in.

Cheers,

Lyndon

-----Original Message-----
From: David Charlap [mailto:david.charlap@marconi.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 24, 2002 7:45 AM
To: IETF MPLS List
Subject: Re: initiating a discussion on mpls singaling protocols

As for the rest, TCP is not an appropriate transport for signaling 
protocols in the first place.  RSVP-TE, LDP and CR-LDP all use a 
message-passing mechanism.  They are not designed around streaming data. 
  Use of a streaming protocol means that the protocol has to deal with 
the issue of detecting message boundaries and half-received messages.

Unfortunately, there is no standard for anything resembling reliable UDP 
- that would be ideal.