IPv6 and UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets
RFC 6935, “IPv6 and UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets”, is a Proposed Standard document published in April 2013 by M. Eubanks, P. Chimento, M. Westerlund. It updates RFC 2460. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
This document updates the IPv6 specification (RFC 2460) to improve performance when a tunnel protocol uses UDP with IPv6 to tunnel packets. The performance improvement is obtained by relaxing the IPv6 UDP checksum requirement for tunnel protocols whose header information is protected on the "inner" packet being carried. Relaxing this requirement removes the overhead associated with the computation of UDP checksums on IPv6 packets that carry the tunnel protocol packets. This specification describes how the IPv6 UDP checksum requirement can be relaxed when the encapsulated packet itself contains a checksum. It also describes the limitations and risks of this approach and discusses the restrictions on the use of this method.
What “Proposed Standard” means
An entry-level standards-track specification: stable, peer-reviewed and a solid basis for implementation, though it may still evolve before becoming an Internet Standard.
The canonical text of RFC 6935 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
- RFC 6934 Applicability of the Access Node Control Mechanism to Broadband Networks Based on Passive Optical Networks
- RFC 6936 Applicability Statement for the Use of IPv6 UDP Datagrams with Zero Checksums
- RFC 6933 Entity MIB
- RFC 6937 Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP
- RFC 6932 Brainpool Elliptic Curves for the Internet Key Exchange Group Description Registry
- RFC 6938 Deprecation of BGP Path Attributes: DPA, ADVERTISER, and RCID_PATH / CLUSTER_ID
- RFC 6931 Additional XML Security Uniform Resource Identifiers
- RFC 6939 Client Link-Layer Address Option in DHCPv6