Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers
RFC 5405, “Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers”, is a Best Current Practice document published in November 2008 by L. Eggert, G. Fairhurst. It has been obsoleted by RFC 8085 — refer to the newer document for the authoritative version. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) provides a minimal message-passing transport that has no inherent congestion control mechanisms. Because congestion control is critical to the stable operation of the Internet, applications and upper-layer protocols that choose to use UDP as an Internet transport must employ mechanisms to prevent congestion collapse and to establish some degree of fairness with concurrent traffic. This document provides guidelines on the use of UDP for the designers of unicast applications and upper-layer protocols. Congestion control guidelines are a primary focus, but the document also provides guidance on other topics, including message sizes, reliability, checksums, and middlebox traversal. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
What “Best Current Practice” means
Documents the IETF community's recommended operational or procedural practice rather than a protocol specification.
The canonical text of RFC 5405 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
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