Internet Engineering Task Force SIP WG Internet Draft J. Rosenberg dynamicsoft H. Schulzrinne Columbia U. G. Camarillo Ericsson draft-ietf-sip-sctp-05.txt November 12, 2004 Expires: May, 2005 The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) as a Transport for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) STATUS OF THIS MEMO This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress". The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt To view the list Internet-Draft Shadow Directories, see http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Abstract This document specifies a mechanism for usage of SCTP (the Stream Control Transmission Protocol) as the transport between SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) entities. SCTP is a new protocol which provides several features that may prove beneficial for transport between SIP entities which exchange a large amount of messages, including gateways and proxies. As SIP is transport independent, support of SCTP is a relatively straightforward process, nearly identical to support for TCP. J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 1] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 2] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 1 Introduction The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has been designed as a new transport protocol for the Internet (or intranets), at the same layer as TCP and UDP. SCTP has been designed with the transport of legacy SS7 signaling messages in mind. We have observed that many of the features designed to support transport of such signaling are also useful for the transport of SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol) , which is used to initiate and manage interactive sessions on the Internet. SIP itself is transport-independent, and can run over any reliable or unreliable message or stream transport. However, procedures are only defined for transport over UDP and TCP. This document defines transport of SIP over SCTP. 2 Terminology The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 3 Potential Benefits Coene et. al. present some of the key benefits of SCTP analyze how they relate to SIP (a more detailed analysis can be found in ). 3.1 Advantages over UDP All the advantages that SCTP has over UDP regarding SIP transport are also shared by TCP. Below there is a list of the general advantages that a connection-oriented transport protocol such as TCP or SCTP has over a connection-less transport protocol such as UDP. Fast Retransmit: SCTP can quickly determine the loss of a packet, as a result of its usage of SACK and a mechanism which sends SACK messages faster than normal when losses are detected. The result is that losses of SIP messages can be detected much faster than when SIP is run over UDP (detection will take at least 500ms, if not more). Note that TCP SACK does exist as well, and TCP also has a fast retransmit option. Over an existing connection, this results in faster call setup times under conditions of packet loss, which is very desirable. This is probably the most significant advantage to SCTP for SIP transport. Congestion Control: SCTP maintains congestion control over the entire association. For SIP, this means that the aggregate J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 3] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 rate of messages between two entities can be controlled. When SIP is run over TCP, the same advantages are afforded. However, when run over UDP, SIP provides less effective congestion control. That is because congestion state (measured in terms of the UDP retransmit interval) is computed on a transaction by transaction basis, rather than across all transactions. Congestion control performance is thus similar to opening N parallel TCP connections, as opposed to sending N messages over 1 TCP connection. Transport layer fragmentation: SCTP and TCP provide transport layer fragmentation. If a SIP message is larger than the MTU size it is fragmented at the transport layer. When UDP is used fragmentation occurs at the IP layer. IP fragmentation increases the likelihood of having packet losses and makes it difficult (when not impossible) NAT and firewall traversal. This feature will become important if the size of SIP messages grows dramatically. 3.2 Advantages over TCP We have shown the advantages of SCTP and TCP over UDP. We now analyze the advantages of SCTP over TCP. Head of the Line: SCTP is message based as opposed to TCP that is stream based. This allows SCTP to separate different signalling messages at the transport layer. TCP just understands bytes. Assembling received bytes to form signalling messages is performed at the application layer. Therefore, TCP always delivers an ordered stream of bytes to the application. On the other hand, SCTP can deliver signalling messages to the application as soon as they arrive (when using the unordered service). The loss of a signalling message does not affect the delivery of the rest of the messages. This avoids the head of line blocking problem in TCP, which occurs when multiple higher layer connections are multiplexed within a single TCP connection. A SIP transaction can be considered an application layer connection. Between proxies there are multiple transactions running. The loss of a message in one transaction should not adversely effect the ability of a different transaction to send a message. Thus, if SIP is run between entities with many transactions occurring in parallel, SCTP can provide improved performance over SIP over TCP (but not SIP over UDP; but SIP over UDP is not ideal from a congestion control standpoint, see above). Easier Parsing: Another advantage of message based protocols J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 4] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 such as SCTP and UDP over stream based protocols such as TCP is that they allow easier parsing of messages at the application layer. There is not need of establishing boundaries (typically using Content-Length headers) between different messages. However, this advantage is almost negligible. Multihoming: An SCTP connection can be associated with multiple IP addresses on the same host. Data is always sent over one of the addresses, but should it become unreachable, data sent to one can migrate to a different address. This improves fault tolerance; network failures making one interface of the server unavailable do not prevent the service from continuing to operate. SIP servers are likely to have substantial fault tolerance requirements. It is worth noting that because SIP is message-oriented, and not stream oriented, the existing SRV (Service Selection) procedures defined in can accomplish the same goal, even when SIP is run over TCP. In fact, SRV records allow the "connection" to fail over to a separate host. Since SIP proxies can run statelessly, failover can be accomplished without data synchronization between the primary and its backups. Thus, the multihoming capabilities of SCTP provide marginal benefits. It is important to note that most of the benefits of SCTP for SIP occur under loss conditions. Therefore, under a zero loss condition, SCTP transport of SIP should perform on par with TCP transport. Research is needed to evaluate under what loss conditions the improvements in setup times and throughput will be observed. 4 Usage of SCTP Usage of SCTP requires no additional headers or syntax in SIP. Below we show an example of a SIP URL with a transport parameter and an example of a Via header field. In both examples SCTP is the transport protocol. sip:Bob.Johnson@example.com;transport=sctp Via: SIP/2.0/SCTP ws1234.example.com:5060 Rules for sending a request over SCTP are identical to TCP. The only difference is that an SCTP sender has to choose a particular stream J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 5] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 within an association in order to send the request (see Section ). Note that no SCTP identifier needs to be defined for SIP messages. Therefore, the Payload Protocol Indentifier in SCTP DATA chunks transporting SIP messages MUST be set to zero. The SIP transport layers of both peers are responsible for managing the persistent SCTP connection between them. On the sender side the core or a client (or server) transaction generates a request (or response) and passes it to the transport layer. The transport sends the request to the peer's transaction layer. The peer's transaction layer is responsible for delivering the incoming request (or response) to the proper existing server (or client) transaction. If no server (or client) transaction exists for the incoming message the transport layer passes the request (or response) to the core, which may decide to construct a new server (or client) transaction. 4.1 Mapping of SIP Transactions into Streams SIP transactions need to be mapped into SCTP streams in a way that avoids Head Of the Line (HOL) blocking. Among all the different ways of performing this mapping that fulfil this requirement, we have chosen the simplest one; a SIP entity SHOULD send every SIP message (request or response) over stream zero with the unordered flag set. On the receiving side, a SIP entity MUST be ready to receive SIP messages over any stream. In the past, it was proposed to use SCTP stream IDs as lightweight SIP transaction identifiers. That proposal was withdrawn because SIP now provides (as defined in RFC 3261 ) a transaction identifier in the branch parameter of the Via entries. This transaction identifier, missing in the previous SIP spec , makes it unnecessary to use the SCTP stream IDs to demultiplex SIP traffic. SIP has many circumstances in which the use of TLS is required, for instance, for routing a SIPS URI running over SCTP MUST NOT use the SCTP unordered delivery service, therefore, SIP over SCTP using TLS MUST NOT use the unordered delivery service. Any SIP use of an extra layer between the transport layer and SIP that requires ordered delivery of messages must observe this requirement. SIP applications that require ordered delivery of messages from the transport layer (e.g., TLS) SHOULD send SIP messages belonging to the same SIP transaction over the same SCTP stream. Additionally, they SHOULD send messages belonging to different SIP transactions over J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 6] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 different SCTP streams, as long as there are enough available streams. A common scenario where the above mechanism should be used consists of two proxies exchanging SIP traffic over a TLS connection using SCTP as the transport protocol. This works because all of the SIP transactions between the two proxies can be established within one SCTP association. Note that if both sides of the association follow this recommendation, when a request arrives over a particular stream, the server is free to return responses over a different stream. This way, both sides manage the available streams in the sending direction, independently of the streams chosen by the other side to send a particular SIP message. This avoids undesirable collisions when seizing a particular stream. 5 Locating a SIP server The primary issue when sending a request is determining whether the next hop server supports SCTP, so that an association can be opened. SIP entities follow normal SIP procedures to discover a server that supports SCTP. 6 Security Considerations The security issues raised in RFC 3261 are not worsened by SCTP, provided the advice in Section 4 is followed and SCTP over TLS is used where TLS would be required in RFC 3261 . So, the mechanisms described in RFC 3436 MUST be used when SIP runs on top of TLS and SCTP. 7 Conclusion This draft has presented a discussion on the applicability of SCTP to SIP transport, and provided a mechanism for allowing two SCTP-capable entities to use an SCTP association to exchange SIP traffic. 8 Author's Addresses Jonathan Rosenberg dynamicsoft 200 Executive Drive Suite 120 J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 7] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 West Orange, NJ 07052 email: jdrosen@dynamicsoft.com Henning Schulzrinne Columbia University M/S 0401 1214 Amsterdam Ave. New York, NY 10027-7003 email: schulzrinne@cs.columbia.edu Gonzalo Camarillo Ericsson Advanced Signalling Research Lab. FIN-02420 Jorvas Finland Phone: +358 9 299 3371 Fax: +358 9 299 3052 Email: Gonzalo.Camarillo@ericsson.com J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 8] Internet Draft SCTP as a Transport for SIP November 12, 2004 Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................ 3 2 Terminology ......................................... 3 3 Potential Benefits .................................. 3 3.1 Advantages over UDP ................................. 3 3.2 Advantages over TCP ................................. 4 4 Usage of SCTP ....................................... 5 4.1 Mapping of SIP Transactions into Streams ............ 6 5 Locating a SIP server ............................... 7 6 Security Considerations ............................. 7 7 Conclusion .......................................... 7 8 Author's Addresses .................................. 7 J. Rosenberg et. al. [Page 2]