Protocol ossification
Protocol ossification is a progressive reduction in the flexibility of network protocol design caused by the presence of middleboxes in the network which cannot easily be removed or upgraded to allow protocol changes. An example of this is the presence of firewall and carrier grade NAT middleboxes in the Internet, where over-cautious checking of protocol fields has prevented the use of those fields for future protocol expansion.[1]
Protocol ossification can be avoided by the use of encryption or tunnelling to hide the structure of new protocol extensions from older middleboxes.[2]
The Internet Engineering Task Force created the Transport Services Working Group (TAPS WG) in 2015 as an attempt to address the problem.[3]
References
- ^ Papastergiou, Giorgos; Fairhurst, Gorry; Ros, David; Brunstrom, Anna; Grinnemo, Karl-Johan; Hurtig, Per; Khademi, Naeem; Tuxen, Michael; Welzl, Michael; Damjanovic, Dragana; Mangiante, Simone (2017). "De-Ossifying the Internet Transport Layer: A Survey and Future Perspectives". IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials. 19 (1): 619–639. doi:10.1109/COMST.2016.2626780. ISSN 1553-877X.
- ^ Corbet, Jonathan (January 29, 2018). "QUIC as a solution to protocol ossification". lwn.net. Retrieved 2020-03-14.
- ^ Welzl; Fairhurst, Gorry; Ros, David (2015). "Ossification: a result of not even trying?" (PDF). www.iab.org.
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External links
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