Subject: [MMUSIC] Trickle ICE review

From: "Pal Martinsen (palmarti)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 09:48:54 +0000

Hi,

Here is my review of the Trickle ICE draft.

Some technical issues/questions:

- Some confusion regarding the checklist state. This is also somewhat confusing in the vanilla spec. A checklist has three defined states: Running, Failed and Succeeded. But it can also implicitly be described as frozen or waiting dependent on the state of the candidate_pairs in the list. I think Trickle ICE would benefit if we added another state: Waiting_for_candidates.
Action: Discuss Checklist sates in ICEbis and addition states in Trickle ICE during next IETF meeting?

- I think Trickle ICE would benefit a lot from the outcome of continious-nomination and the passive-agressive proposals. At least if we are aiming for Trickle ICE to be used as an address mobility technique as well. Depends how quick we want trickle ICE out of the door. This can easily be fixed by another draft describing Trickle ICE mobility later

- Separate SDP from the documents as done with ICEbis?

More inline (Sorry for having my “beeing difficult” hat on)

Network Working Group                                            E. Ivov
Internet-Draft                                                     Jitsi
Intended status: Standards Track                             E. Rescorla
Expires: July 19, 2015                                        RTFM, Inc.
                                                               J. Uberti
                                                                  Google
                                                        January 15, 2015

Trickle ICE: Incremental Provisioning of Candidates for the Interactive
               Connectivity Establishment (ICE) Protocol
                    draft-ietf-mmusic-trickle-ice-02

Abstract

   This document describes an extension to the Interactive Connectivity
   Establishment (ICE) protocol that allows ICE agents to send and
   receive candidates incrementally rather than exchanging complete
   lists.  With such incremental provisioning, ICE agents can begin
   connectivity checks while they are still gathering candidates and
   considerably shorten the time necessary for ICE processing to
   complete.

To me trickle ICE also seems to provide a simpler “address” mobility scheme. No need to do ICE restart and so on when new addresses are discovered.

Not sure if that is worth mentioning in the abstract, but ti me that is one of the compelling things about trickle ICE.

   The above mechanism is also referred to as "trickle ICE".

Status of This Memo

[snip]

1.  Introduction

   The Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) protocol [RFC5245]
   describes mechanisms for gathering, candidates, prioritizing them,

A “,” to much?

Maybe some text about it is not just local candidates that needs gathering. Is the main concern that RELAY and RFLX candidates take longer than HOST? It might be good to have an introduction that explains things for readers not to familiar with ICE.

   choosing default ones, exchanging them with the remote party, pairing
   them and ordering them into check lists.  Once all of the above have
   been completed, and only then, the participating agents can begin a
   phase of connectivity checks and eventually select the pair of
   candidates that will be used in the following session.

pair of candidates = candidate pair?

   While the above sequence has the advantage of being relatively
   straightforward to implement and debug once deployed, it may also
   prove to be rather lengthy.  Gathering candidates or candidate
   harvesting would often involve things like querying STUN [RFC5389]
   servers, discovering UPnP devices, and allocating relayed candidates

If you mention UPnP it would be fair to mention PCP as well (RFC6887).

I would like to focus on STUN and TURN and do mention that UDP and PCP “tricks” can further delay candidate gathering if they are needed to get a working candidate pair.

I get the feeling when reading this that it is a bit on the “negative” side. The draft is adopted, no need to paint a totally black picture.. :-). REALY and RFLX can be learnt in the same STUN transaction and so on.

   at TURN [RFC5766] servers.  All of these can be delayed for a
   noticeable amount of time and while they can be run in parallel, they
   still need to respect the pacing requirements from [RFC5245], which
   is likely to delay them even further.  Some or all of the above would
   also have to be completed by the remote agent.  Both agents would
   next perform connectivity checks and only then would they be ready to
   begin streaming media.

Multihoming and dual-stack make this even worse.

   All of the above could lead to relatively lengthy session
   establishment times and degraded user experience.

   The purpose of this document is to define an alternative mode of
   operation for ICE implementations, also known as "trickle ICE", where
   candidates can be exchanged incrementally.  This would allow ICE
   agents to exchange host candidates as soon as a session has been
   initiated.  Connectivity checks for a media stream would also start
   as soon as the first candidates for that stream have become
   available.

So in essence candidate gathering and connectivity checks can now be done in parallel? How does this affect the restriction regarding how many STUN packets we can send pr time-slot?

   Trickle ICE allows reducing session establishment times in cases
   where connectivity is confirmed for the first exchanged candidates
   (e.g. where the host candidates for one of the agents are directly
   reachable from the second agent).  Even when this is not the case,
   running candidate harvesting for both agents and connectivity checks
   all in parallel allows to considerably reduce ICE processing times.

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   It is worth pointing out that before being introduced to the IETF,
   trickle ICE had already been included in specifications such as XMPP
   Jingle [XEP-0176] and it has been in use in various implementations
   and deployments.

Nice background information,  but is this needed now when the draft is adopted?

   In addition to the basics of trickle ICE, this document also
   describes how support for trickle ICE needs to be discovered, how
   regular ICE processing needs to be modified when building and
   updating check lists, and how trickle ICE implementations should
   interoperate with agents that only implement [RFC5245] processing.

   This specification does not define usage of trickle ICE with any
   specific signalling protocol, contrary to [RFC5245] which contains a
   usage for ICE with SIP.  Such usages would have to be specified in
   separate documents such as for example
   [I-D.ivov-mmusic-trickle-ice-sip].

   Trickle ICE does however reuse and build upon the SDP syntax defined
   by [RFC5245].

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 [RFC2119].

   This specification makes use of all terminology defined by the
   protocol for Interactive Connectivity Establishment in [RFC5245].

   Vanilla ICE:  The Interactive Connectivity Establishment protocol as
      defined in [RFC5245].  Through the rest of the text, the terms
      vanilla ICE and "RFC5245" are used interchangeably.

+1 for actually defining the term vanilla ICE.

   Candidate Harvester:  A module used by an ICE agent to obtain local
      candidates.  Candidate harvesters use different mechanisms for
      discovering local candidates.  Some of them would typically make
      use of protocols such as STUN or TURN.  Others may also employ
      techniques that are not referenced within [RFC5245].  UPnP based
      port allocation and XMPP Jingle Relay Nodes [XEP-0278] are among
      the possible examples.

Is harvester just a better gatherer? Anyway nice of ICE to take the step up and away from hunter/gatherer evolution stage.

   Trickled Candidates:  Candidates that a trickle ICE agent is sending
      subsequently to but within the context defined by an offer or an
      answer.  Trickled candidates can be sent in parallel with
      candidate harvesting and connectivity checks.

Any limitations worth mentioning?

   Trickling/Trickle (v.):  The act of sending trickled candidates.

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   Half Trickle:  A trickle ICE mode of operation where the offerer
      gathers its first generation of candidates strictly before
      creating and sending the offer.  Once sent, that offer can be
      processed by vanilla ICE agents and does not require support for
      this specification.  It also allows trickle ICE capable answerers
      to still gather candidates and perform connectivity checks in a
      non-blocking way, thus roughly offering "half" the advantages of
      trickle ICE.  The mechanism is mostly meant for use in cases where
      support for trickle ICE cannot be confirmed prior to sending a
      first offer.

When is it possible to know what the remote side supports before sending the offer? Some strict controlled environments? Or are we talking about offers in a typical reINVITE scenario?

Also the sentence “A trickle ICE mode of operation where the offerer gathers its first generation of candidates strictly before creating and sending the offer.” is unclear to me. Does strictly imply that a complete set of candidates must be present (HOST, RFLX, RELAY)?

   Full Trickle:  Regular mode of operation for trickle ICE agents, used
      in opposition to the half trickle mode of operation.

3.  Incompatibility with Standard ICE

   The ICE protocol was designed to be fairly flexible so that it would
   work in and adapt to as many network environments as possible.  It is
   hence important to point out at least some of the reasons why,
   despite its flexibility, the specification in [RFC5245] would not
   support trickle ICE.

   [RFC5245] describes the conditions required to update check lists and
   timer states while an ICE agent is in the Running state.  These
   conditions are verified upon transaction completion and one of them
   stipulates that:

      If there is not a pair in the valid list for each component of the
      media stream, the state of the check list is set to Failed.

   This could be a problem and cause ICE processing to fail prematurely
   in a number of scenarios.  Consider the following case:

   o  Alice and Bob are both located in different networks with Network
      Address Translation (NAT).  Alice and Bob themselves have
      different address but both networks use the same [RFC1918] block.

   o  Alice sends Bob the candidate 10.0.0.10 which also happens to
      correspond to an existing host on Bob's network.

   o  Bob creates a check list consisting solely of 10.0.0.10 and starts
      checks.

   o  These checks reach the host at 10.0.0.10 in Bob's network, which
      responds with an ICMP "port unreachable" error and per [RFC5245]
      Bob marks the transaction as Failed.

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   At this point the check list only contains Failed candidates and the
   valid list is empty.  This causes the media stream and potentially
   all ICE processing to Fail.

Because a Trickle offer would look like a full offer from the vanilla ICE side? Can the Offerer detect this and do an ICE restart with half trickle?

   A similar race condition would occur if the initial offer from Alice
   only contains candidates that can be determined as unreachable (per
   [I-D.keranen-mmusic-ice-address-selection])

Draft expired. Now part of ICEbis?

 from any of the
   candidates that Bob has gathered.  This would be the case if Bob's
   candidates only contain IPv4 addresses and the first candidate that
   he receives from Alice is an IPv6 one.

   Another potential problem could arise when a non-trickle ICE
   implementation sends an offer to a trickle one.  Consider the
   following case:

   o  Alice's client has a non-trickle ICE implementation

   o  Bob's client has support for trickle ICE.

   o  Alice and Bob are behind NATs with address-dependent filtering
      [RFC4787].

   o  Bob has two STUN servers but one of them is currently unreachable

   After Bob's agent receives Alice's offer it would immediately start
   connectivity checks.  It would also start gathering candidates, which
   would take long because of the unreachable STUN server.  By the time
   Bob's answer is ready and sent to Alice, Bob's connectivity checks
   may well have failed: until Alice gets Bob's answer, she won't be
   able to start connectivity checks and punch holes in her NAT.  The
   NAT would hence be filtering Bob's checks as originating from an
   unknown endpoint.

4.  Determining Support for Trickle ICE

   According to [RFC5245] every time an agent supporting trickle ICE
   generates an offer or an answer, it MUST include the "trickle" token
   in the ice-options attribute.  Syntax for this token is defined in
   Section 5.1.

??
5245 does not support trickle ICE? At least not yet.

For some reason I looked for this information in Section 5.1 in RFC 5245. Maybe point out in this document? (To help readers like me that want to misunderstand)

   Additionally, in order to avoid interoperability problems such as
   those described in Section 3

In this document?

, it is important that trickle ICE
   negotiation is only attempted in cases where the remote party
   actually supports this specification.  Agents that receive offers or
   answers can verify support by examining them for the "trickle" ice-
   options token.  However, agents that are about to send a first offer,
   have no immediate way of doing this.  This means that usages of
   trickle for specific protocols would need to either:

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   o  Provide a way for agents to verify support of trickle ICE prior to
      initiating a session.  XMPP's Service discovery [XEP-0030] is an
      example for one such mechanism;

   o  Make support for trickle ICE mandatory so that support could be
      assumed the agents.

assumed by the agents.

Seems like bad advice. If you assume something you do not know for sure. We are barely at a palace where we can assume ICE support, but maybe things will speed up. For this assumption to be true I think ICEbis must mandate Trickle ICE usage?

   Alternately, for cases where a protocol provides neither of the
   above, agents may either rely on provisioning/configuration, or use
   the half trickle procedure described in Section 4.1.

   Note that out-of-band discovery semantics and half trickle are only
   necessary prior to session initiation, or in other words, when
   sending the initial offer.  Once a session is established and trickle
   ICE support is confirmed for both parties, either agent can use full
   trickle for subsequent offers.

That was much better advise!

4.1.  Unilateral Use of Trickle ICE (Half Trickle)

   The idea of using half trickle is about having the caller send a
   regular, vanilla ICE offer, with a complete set of candidates.  This
   offer still indicates support for trickle ice, so the answerer is
   able to respond with an incomplete set of candidates and continue
   trickling the rest.  Half trickle offers will typically contain an
   end-of-candidates indication, although this is not mandatory as, in
   case trickle support is confirmed, the offerer may choose to trickle
   additional candidates (e.g., additional relay candidates) before it
   declares end of trickling.

   The half trickle mechanism can be used in cases where there is no way
   for an agent to verify in advance whether a remote party supports
   trickle ice.  Because it contains a full set of candidates, its first
   offer can thus be handled by a regular vanilla ICE agent, while still
   allowing a trickle one to use the optimisation defined in this
   specification.  This prevents negotiation from failing in the former
   case while still giving roughly half the trickle ICE benefits in the
   latter (hence the name of the mechanism).

   Use of half trickle is only necessary during an initial offer/answer
   exchange.  Once both parties have received a session description from
   their peer, they can each reliably determine trickle ICE support and
   use it for all subsequent offer/answer exchanges.

   It is worth pointing out that using half trickle may actually bring
   more than just half the improvement in terms of user experience.
   This can happen in cases where an agent starts gathering candidates
   upon user interface cues that a call is pending, such as activity on
   a keypad or the phone going off hook.  This would mean a part or all

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   candidate harvesting could have completed before the agent actually
   needs to send the offer.  Given that the answerer will be able to
   trickle candidates, both agents will be able to start connectivity
   checks and complete ICE processing earlier than with vanilla ICE and
   potentially even as early as with full trickle.

   However, such anticipation is not not always possible.  For example,
   a multipurpose user agent or a WebRTC web page where communication is
   a non-central feature (e.g. calling a support line in case of a
   problem with the main features) would not necessarily have a way of
   distinguishing between call intentions and other user activity.
   Still, even in these cases, using half trickle would be an
   improvement over vanilla ICE as it would optimize performance for
   answerers.

Question/possible interop improvement.

For a multihomed host can it pick the “best” interface (The one with the default route) and do all candidate harvesting there (HOST, RFLX and REALY). In other words do a interface-half-trickle. Send that to remote side. If remote side supports trickle, continue harvesting on the other available interfaces. If not supported on the remote side, hopefully media will still work. But you can always do a complete harvest on all interfaces and then do a ICE restart?

5.  Sending the Initial Offer

   An agent starts gathering candidates as soon as it has an indication
   that communication is imminent (e.g. a user interface cue or an
   explicit request to initiate a session).  Contrary to vanilla ICE,
   implementations of trickle ICE do not need to gather candidates in a
   blocking manner.

What do you mean by blocking manner? I sort of need to get my HOST candidate ready and open up the socket before I can send the Allocate Request to obtain my RELAY addr and learn my RFLX addr. At least harvesting RELAY and RFLX is done in parallel and does not block.

Is this more blocking for multihomed clients? Or can candidate gathering on the available interfaces happen in parallel?

Therefore, unless half trickle is being used,
   agents SHOULD generate and transmit their initial offer as early as
   possible, in order to allow the remote party to start gathering and
   trickling candidates.

   Trickle ICE agents MAY include any set of candidates in an offer.
   This includes the possibility of generating one with no candidates,
   or one that contains all the candidates that the agent is planning on
   using in the following session.

   For optimal performance, it is RECOMMENDED that an initial offer
   contains host candidates only.  This would allow both agents to start
   gathering server reflexive, relayed and other non-host candidates
   simultaneously, and it would also enable them to begin connectivity
   checks.

Good recommendation. Get HOST ready to kick-start things on both sides.

   If the privacy implications of revealing host addresses are a
   concern, agents MAY generate an offer that contains no candidates and
   then only trickle candidates that do not reveal host addresses (e.g.
   relayed candidates).

   Prior to actually sending an initial offer, agents MAY verify if the
   remote party supports trickle ICE, where such mechanisms actually
   exist.  If absence of such support is confirmed agents MUST fall back
   to using vanilla ICE or abandon the entire session.

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   All trickle ICE offers and answers MUST indicate support of this
   specification, as explained in Section 5.1.

   Calculating priorities and foundations, as well as determining
   redundancy of candidates work the same way they do with vanilla ICE.

5.1.  Encoding the SDP

Would it make sense to follow the ICBis work and split SDP related things to a separate draft?

   The process of encoding the SDP [RFC4566] is mostly the same as the
   one used by vanilla ICE.  Still, trickle ICE does require a few
   differences described here.

   Agents MUST indicate support for Trickle ICE by including the
   "trickle" token for the "a=ice-options" attribute:

       a=ice-options:trickle

Is this a pr session or medialine attribute? Does it make sense to only trickle one of the medialines (If you have more than one?)

   As mentioned earlier in this section, Offers and Answers can contain
   any set of candidates, which means that a trickle ICE session
   description MAY contain no candidates at all.  In such cases the
   agent would still need to place an address in the "c=" line(s).  If
   the use of a host address there is undesirable (e.g. for privacy
   reasons), the agent MAY set the connection address to IP6 ::. In this
   case it MUST also set the port number to 9 (Discard).  There is no
   need to include a fictitious candidate for the IP6 :: address when
   doing so.

   It is worth noting that the use of IP6 :: has been selected over IP4
   0.0.0.0, even though [RFC3264] already gives the latter semantics
   appropriate for such use.  The reason for this choice is the historic
   use of 0.0.0.0 as a means of putting a stream on hold [RFC2543] and
   the ambiguity that this may cause with legacy libraries and
   applications.

   It is also worth mentioning that use of IP6 :: here does not
   constitute any kind of indication as to the actual use of IPv6
   candidates in a session and it can very well appear in a negotiation
   that only involves IPv4 candidates.

6.  Receiving the Initial Offer

   When an agent receives an initial offer, it will first check if it
   indicates support for trickle ICE as explained in Section 4.  If this
   is not the case, the agent MUST process the offer according to the
   [RFC5245] procedures or standard [RFC3264] processing in case no ICE
   support is detected at all.

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   It is worth pointing out that in case support for trickle ICE is
   confirmed, an agent will automatically assume support for vanilla ICE
   as well even if the support verification procedure in [RFC5245]
   indicates otherwise.  Specifically, such verification would indicate
   lack of support when the offer contains no candidates.  The IP6 ::
   address present in the c= line in that case would not "appear in a
   candidate attribute".  Obviously, a fallback to [RFC3264] is not
   required when this happens.

Can we simplify this by saying that Trickle ICE do not care about the C line (default candidate)?

   If, the offer does indicate support for trickle ICE, the agent will
   determine its role, start gathering and prioritizing candidates and,
   while doing so it will also respond by sending its own answer, so
   that both agents can start forming check lists and begin connectivity
   checks.

6.1.  Sending the Initial Answer

   An agent can respond to an initial offer at any point while gathering
   candidates.  The answer can again contain any set of candidates
   including none or all of them.  Unless it is protecting host
   addresses for privacy reasons, the agent would typically construct
   this initial answer including only them, thus allowing the remote
   party to also start forming checklists and performing connectivity
   checks.

   The answer MUST indicate support for trickle ICE as described by
   Section 4.

Does it need to set a address int he C line. Can any trickle ICE answers always contain a :: address?

6.2.  Forming check lists and beginning connectivity checks

   After exchanging offer and answer, and as soon as they have obtained

I still do not like the offer answer lingo in general ICE (As discussed regarding ICEbis).
Can we instead say: "After the initial remote and local candidates have been exchanged,…”

   local and remote candidates, agents will begin forming candidate
   pairs, computing their priorities and creating check lists according
   to the vanilla ICE procedures described in [RFC5245].  Obviously in
   order for candidate pairing to be possible, it would be necessary
   that both the offer and the answer contained candidates.  If this was
   not the case agents will still create the check lists (so that their
   Active/Frozen state could be monitored and updated) but they will
   only populate them once they actually have the candidate pairs.

   Initially, all check lists will have their Active/Frozen state set to
   Frozen.

I thought the checklist state could be: Running, Completed, Failed. Are you talking about candidate pair states?

This is also confusing in the original spec. The states are defined, but a checklist can be active and and frozen

   Trickle ICE agents will then inspect the first check list and attempt
   to unfreeze all candidates belonging to the first component on the
   first media stream (i.e. the first media stream that was reported to
   the ICE implementation from the using application).  If this

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   checklist is still empty however, agents will hold off further
   processing until this is no longer the case.

Can we have a new checklist state? Waiting for candidates? Think that would simplify the text and implementations.

   Respecting the order in which lists have been reported to an ICE
   implementation, or in other words, the order in which they appear in
   SDP, is crucial to the frozen candidates algorithm and important when
   making sure that connectivity checks are performed simultaneously by
   both agents.

6.3.  Encoding the SDP

   The process for encoding the SDP at the answerer is identical to the
   process followed by the offerer for both full and lite
   implementations, as described in Section 5.1.

7.  Receiving the Initial Answer

   When receiving an answer, agents will follow vanilla ICE procedures
   to determine their role and they would then form check lists (as
   described in Section 6.2) and begin connectivity checks .

8.  Performing Connectivity Checks

   For the most part, trickle ICE agents perform connectivity checks
   following vanilla ICE procedures.  Of course, the asynchronous nature
   of candidate harvesting in trickle ICE would impose a number of
   changes described here.

8.1.  Check List and Timer State Updates

   The vanilla ICE specification requires that agents update check lists
   and timer states upon completing a connectivity check transaction.
   During such an update vanilla ICE agents would set the state of a
   check list to Failed if the following two conditions are satisfied:

   o  all of the pairs in the check list are either in the Failed or
      Succeeded state;

   o  if at least one of the components of the media stream has no pairs
      in its valid list.

Would this be the same as; the checklist state is set to failed if all of the candidate pairs in the checklist are failed, or one of the components of the media stream has no candidate pairs in either succeeded, waiting or frozen state?

The lack of a candidate pair in the valid list might be because that particular check is in progress? Or?

   With trickle ICE, the above situation would often occur when
   candidate harvesting and trickling are still in progress and it is
   perfectly possible that future checks will succeed.  For this reason
   trickle ICE agents add the following conditions to the above list:

   o  all candidate harvesters have completed and the agent is not
      expecting to discover any new local candidates;

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   o  the remote agent has sent an end-of-candidates indication for that
      check list as described in Section 9.3.

I thought the way an agent signalled to the ICE machine that it did not expected any more candidates was to send an end of candidates indication? I think the first bullet point is unnecessary, or underspecified.

   Vanilla ICE requires that agents then update all other check lists,

That would be the checklists for the other media streams?

   placing one pair in each of them into the Waiting state, effectively
   unfreezing all remaining check lists.  Given that with trickle ICE,
   other check lists may still be empty at that point, a trickle ICE
   agent SHOULD also maintain an explicit Active/Frozen state for every
   check list, rather than deducing it from the state of the pairs it
   contains.  This state should be set to Active when unfreezing the
   first pair in a list or when that couldn't happen because a list was
   empty.

I think this is easier solved with a new defined checklist state as mentioned above. Having a checklist in waiting for candidates will (i think) make it easier to describe and implement. We should write up a new state diagram that describes this.

9.  Discovering and Sending Additional Local Candidates

   After an offer or an answer have been sent, agents will most likely
   continue discovering new local candidates as STUN, TURN and other
   non-host candidate harvesting mechanisms begin to yield results.

non-host = none HOST candidate type harvesting? Referring to things like UPnP and PCP?

   Whenever an agent discovers such a new candidate it will compute its
   priority, type, foundation and component id according to normal
   vanilla ICE procedures.

A section reference here would be helpful for the reader.

   The new candidate is then checked for redundancy against the existing
   list of local candidates.  If its transport address and base match
   those of an existing candidate, it will be considered redundant and
   will be ignored.  This would often happen for server reflexive
   candidates that match the host addresses they were obtained from
   (e.g. when the latter are public IPv4 addresses).  Contrary to
   vanilla ICE, trickle ICE agents will consider the new candidate
   redundant regardless of its priority.

I am a bit confused, vanilla ICE talks about pruning candidate pairs. Here we discuss removing a candidate?

   Next the client sends (i.e. trickles) the newly learnt candidate(s)
   to the remote agent.  The actual delivery of the new candidates will
   be specified by using protocols such as SIP.  Trickle ICE imposes no
   restrictions on the way this is done or whether it is done at all.
   For example, some applications may choose not to send trickle updates
   for server reflexive candidates and rely on the discovery of peer
   reflexive ones instead.

Might be useful to note that PRFLX candidates do not need to be trickled.

   When trickle updates are sent however, each candidate MUST be
   delivered to the receiving Trickle ICE implementation not more than
   once and in the same order that they were sent.  In other words, if
   there are any candidate retransmissions, they must be hidden from the
   ICE implementation.

   Also, candidate trickling needs to be correlated to a specific ICE
   negotiation session, so that if there is an ICE restart, any delayed

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   updates for a previous session can be recognized as such and ignored
   by the receiving party.

   One important aspect of Vanilla ICE is that connectivity checks for a
   specific foundation and component be attempted simultaneously by both
   agents, so that any firewalls or NATs fronting the agents would
   whitelist both endpoints and allow all except for the first (suicide)
   packets to go through.  This is also crucial to unfreezing candidates
   in the right time.

   In order to preserve this feature here, when trickling candidates
   agents MUST respect the order of the components as they appear
   (implicitly or explicitly) in the Offer/Answer descriptions.
   Therefore a candidate for a specific component MUST NOT be sent prior
   to candidates for other components within the same foundation.

   For example, the following session description contains two
   components (RTP and RTCP), and two foundations (host and the server
   reflexive):

     v=0
     o=jdoe 2890844526 2890842807 IN IP4 10.0.1.1
     s=
     c=IN IP4 10.0.1.1
     t=0 0
     a=ice-pwd:asd88fgpdd777uzjYhagZg
     a=ice-ufrag:8hhY
     m=audio 5000 RTP/AVP 0
     a=rtpmap:0 PCMU/8000
     a=candidate:1 1 UDP 2130706431 10.0.1.1 5000 typ host
     a=candidate:1 2 UDP 2130706431 10.0.1.1 5001 typ host
     a=candidate:2 1 UDP 1694498815 192.0.2.3 5000 typ srflx
         raddr 10.0.1.1 rport 8998
     a=candidate:2 2 UDP 1694498815 192.0.2.3 5001 typ srflx
         raddr 10.0.1.1 rport 8998

I think the example is wrong.

The component ID is part of the priority formula, so the components will not have the same priority. I think the priority will solve the problem described here. No need to mandate to preserve the order it is sent in.

   For this description the RTCP host candidate MUST NOT be sent prior
   to the RTP host candidate.  Similarly the RTP server reflexive
   candidate MUST be sent together with or prior to the RTCP server
   reflexive candidate.

   Note that the order restriction only applies among candidates that
   belong to the same foundation.

   It is also equally important to preserve this order across media
   streams and this is covered by the requirement to always start

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   unfreezing candidates starting from the first media stream
   Section 6.2.

The important thing is that a trickled candidate must be associated with a mediastream/checklist?

   Once the candidate has been sent to the remote party, the agent
   checks if any remote candidates are currently known for this same
   stream.  If this is not the case the new candidate will simply be
   added to the list of local candidates.

   Otherwise, if the agent has already learned of one or more remote
   candidates for this stream and component, it will begin pairing the
   new local candidates with them and adding the pairs to the existing
   check lists according to their priority.

9.1.  Pairing newly learned candidates and updating check lists

   Forming candidate pairs will work the way it is described by the
   vanilla ICE specification.  Actually adding the new pair to a check
   list however, will happen according to the rules described below.

   If the check list where the pair is to be added already contains the
   maximum number of candidate pairs (100 by default as per [RFC5245]),
   the new pair is discarded.

   If the new pair's local candidate is server reflexive, the server
   reflexive candidate MUST be replaced by its base before adding the
   pair to the list.  Once this is done, the agent examines the check
   list looking for another pair that would be redundant with the new
   one.  If such a pair exists, the newly formed pair is ignored.

How does this differ from the vanilla spec?

   For all other pairs, including those with a server reflexive local
   candidate that were not found to be redundant:

   o  if this check list is Frozen then the new pair will also be
      assigned a Frozen state.

   o  else if the check list is Active and it is either empty or
      contains only candidates in the Succeeded and Failed states, then
      the new pair's state is set to Waiting.

   o  else if the check list is non-empty and Active, then the new pair
      state will be set to

      Frozen:   if there is at least one pair in the list whose
         foundation matches the one in the new pair and whose state is
         neither Succeeded nor Failed (eventually the new pair will get
         unfrozen after the the on-going check for the existing pair
         concludes);

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      Waiting:   if the list contains no pairs with the same foundation
         as the new one, or, in case such pairs exist but they are all
         in either the Succeeded or Failed states.

9.2.  Encoding the SDP for Additional Candidates

   To facilitate interoperability an ICE agent will encode additional
   candidates using the vanilla ICE SDP syntax.  For example:

       a=candidate:2 1 UDP 1658497328 198.51.100.33 5000 typ host

   Given that such lines do not provide a relationship between the
   candidate and the m line that it relates to, signalling protocols
   using trickle ICE MUST establish that relation themselves using an
   MID [RFC3388].  Such MIDs use "media stream identification", as
   defined in [RFC3388], to identify a corresponding m-line.  When
   creating candidate lines usages of trickle ICE MUST use the MID if
   possible, or the m-line index if not.  Obviously, agents MUST NOT
   send individual candidates prior to generating the corresponding SDP
   session description.

   The exact means of transporting additional candidates to a remote
   agent is left to the protocols using trickle ICE.  It is important to
   note, however, that these candidate exchanges are not part of the
   offer/answer model.

+1

9.3.  Announcing End of Candidates

   Once all candidate harvesters for a specific media stream complete,
   or expire, the agents will generate an "end-of-candidates" indication
   for that stream and send it to the remote agent via the signalling
   channel.  Such indications are sent in the form of a media-level
   attribute that has the following form: end-of-candidates.

               a=end-of-candidates

   The end-of-candidates indications can be sent as part of an offer,
   which would typically be the case with half trickle initial offers,
   they can accompany the last candidate an agent can send for a stream,
   and they can also be sent alone (e.g.  after STUN Binding requests or
   TURN Allocate requests to a server timeout and the agent has no other
   active harvesters).

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   Controlled trickle ICE agents SHOULD always send end-of-candidates
   indications once harvesting for a media stream has completed unless
   ICE processing terminates before they've had a chance to do so.
   Sending the indication is necessary in order to avoid ambiguities and
   speed up ICE conclusion.  This is necessary in order to avoid
   ambiguities and speed up ICE conclusion.

Would continuos nomination help here? Mandating that controlled agents send end-of-candidates somewhat limits the usability of trickle ICE in address mobility scenarios. This can easily be fixed by a ICE mobility draft, but I think it is better handled here.

Controlling agents on the
   other hand MAY sometimes conclude ICE processing prior to sending
   end-of-candidates notifications for all streams.  This would
   typically be the case with aggressive nomination.  Yet it is
   RECOMMENDED that controlling agents do send such indications whenever
   possible for the sake of consistency and keeping middle boxes and
   controlled agents up-to-date on the state of ICE processing.

So do we wait for the passive aggressive discussions to finish, or do we want trickle ICE out of the door before that?

   When sending end-of-candidates during trickling, rather than as a
   part of an offer or an answer, it is the responsibility of the using
   protocol to define means that can be used to relate the indication to
   one or more specific m-lines.

   Receiving an end-of-candidates notification allows an agent to update
   check list states and, in case valid pairs do not exist for every
   component in every media stream, determine that ICE processing has
   failed.  It also allows agents to speed ICE conclusion in cases where
   a candidate pair has been validates but it involves the use of lower-
   preference transports such as TURN.  In such situations some
   implementations may choose to wait in case higher-priority candidates
   are received and end-of-candidates provides an indication that this
   is not going to happen.

   An agent MAY also choose to generate an end-of-candidates event
   before candidate harvesting has actually completed, if the agent
   determines that harvesting has continued for more than an acceptable
   period of time.  However, an agent MUST NOT send any more candidates
   after it has send an end-of-candidates notification.

   When performing half trickle agents SHOULD send end-of-candidates
   together with their initial offer unless they are planning on
   potentially sending additional candidates in case the remote party
   turns out to actually support trickle ICE.

   When end-of-candidates is sent as part of an offer or an answer it
   can appear as a session-level attribute, which would be equivalent to
   having it appear in all m-lines.

   Once an agent sends the end-of-candidates event, it will update the
   state of the corresponding check list as explained in section
   Section 8.1.  Past that point agents MUST NOT send any new
   candidates.  Once an agent has received an end-of-candidates
   indication, it MUST also ignore any newly received candidates for

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   that media stream.  Adding new candidates to the negotiation is hence
   only possible through an ICE restart.

   It is important to note that This specification does not override
   vanilla ICE semantics for concluding ICE processing.  This means that
   even if end-of-candidates indications are sent agents will still have
   to go through pair nomination.  Also, if pairs have been nominated
   for components and media streams, ICE processing will still conclude
   even if end-of-candidate indications have not been received for all
   streams.

10.  Receiving Additional Remote Candidates

   At any point of ICE processing, a trickle ICE agent may receive new
   candidates from the remote agent.  When this happens and no local
   candidates are currently known for this same stream, the new remote
   candidates are simply added to the list of remote candidates.

   Otherwise, the new candidates are used for forming candidate pairs
   with the pool of local candidates and they are added to the local
   check lists as described in Section 9.1.

   Once the remote agent has completed candidate harvesting, it will
   send an end-of-candidates event.  Upon receiving such an event, the
   local agent MUST update check list states as per Section 8.1.  This
   may lead to some check lists being marked as Failed.

11.  Receiving an End Of Candidates Notification

   When an agent receives an end-of-candidates notification for a
   specific check list, they will update its state as per Section 8.1.
   In case the list is still in the Active state after the update, the
   agent will persist the the fact that an end-of-candidates
   notification has been received for and take it into account in future
   list updates.

12.  Trickle ICE and Peer Reflexive Candidates

   Even though Trickle ICE does not explicitly modify the procedures for
   handling peer reflexive candidates, their processing could be
   impacted in implementations.  With Trickle ICE, it is possible that
   server reflexive candidates be discovered as peer reflexive in cases
   where incoming connectivity checks are received from these candidates
   before the trickle updates that carry them.

   While this would certainly increase the number of cases where ICE
   processing nominates and selects candidates discovered as peer-
   reflexive it does not require any change in processing.

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   It is also likely that, some applications would prefer not to trickle
   server reflexive candidates to entities that are known to be publicly
   accessible and where sending a direct STUN binding request is likely
   to reach the destination faster than the trickle update that travels
   through the signalling path.

13.  Concluding ICE Processing

   This specification does not directly modify the procedures ending ICE
   processing described in Section 8 of [RFC5245], and trickle ICE
   implementations will follow the same rules.

14.  Subsequent Offer/Answer Exchanges

   Either agent MAY generate a subsequent offer at any time allowed by
   [RFC3264].  When this happens agents will use [RFC5245] semantics to
   determine whether or not the new offer requires an ICE restart.  If
   this is the case then agents would perform trickle ICE as they would
   in an initial offer/answer exchange.

   The only differences between an ICE restart and a brand new media
   session are that:

   o  during the restart, media can continue to be sent to the
      previously validated pair.

   o  both agents are already aware whether or not their peer supports
      trickle ICE, and there is no longer need for performing half
      trickle or confirming support with other mechanisms.

15.  Interaction with ICE Lite

   Behaviour of Trickle ICE capable ICE lite agents does not require any
   particular rules other than those already defined in this
   specification and [RFC5245].  This section is hence added with an
   informational purpose only.

   A Trickle ICE capable ICE Lite agent would generate offers or answers
   as per [RFC5245].  Both will indicate support for trickle ICE
   (Section 5.1) and given that they will contain a complete set of
   candidates (the agent's host candidates) these offers and answers
   would also be accompanied with an end-of-candidates notification.

   When performing full trickle, a full ICE implementation could send an
   offer or an answer with no candidates and an IP6 :: connection line
   address.  After receiving an answer that identifies the remote agent
   as an ICE lite implementation, the offerer may very well choose to
   not send any additional candidates.  The same is also true in the

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   case when the ICE lite agent is making the offer and the full ICE one
   is answering.  In these cases the connectivity checks would be enough
   for the ICE lite implementation to discover all potentially useful
   candidates as peer reflexive.  The following example illustrates one
   such ICE session:

           ICE Lite                                          Bob
            Agent
              |   Offer (a=ice-lite a=ice-options:trickle)    |
              |---------------------------------------------->|
              |                                               |no cand
              |         Answer (a=ice-options:trickle)        |trickling
              |<----------------------------------------------|
              |              Connectivity Checks              |
              |<--------------------------------------------->|
     peer rflx|                                               |
    cand disco|                                               |
              |                                               |
              |<=============== MEDIA FLOWS =================>|

                             Figure 1: Example

   In addition to reducing signaling traffic this approach also removes
   the need to discover STUN bindings, or to make TURN or UPnP
   allocations which may considerably lighten ICE processing.

16.  Example Flow

   A typical successful trickle ICE exchange with an Offer/Answer
   protocol would look this way:

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           Alice                                            Bob
             |                     Offer                     |
             |---------------------------------------------->|
             |            Additional Candidates              |
             |---------------------------------------------->|
             |                                               |
             |                     Answer                    |
             |<----------------------------------------------|
             |            Additional Candidates              |
             |<----------------------------------------------|
             |                                               |
             | Additional Candidates and Connectivity Checks |
             |<--------------------------------------------->|
             |                                               |
             |<=============== MEDIA FLOWS =================>|

                             Figure 2: Example

17.  Security Considerations

   This specification inherits most of its semantics from [RFC5245] and
   as a result all security considerations described there remain the
   same.

18.  Acknowledgements

   The authors would like to thank Bernard Aboba, Christer Holmberg,
   Dale R.  Worley, Enrico Marocco, Flemming Andreasen, Jonathan Lennox
   and Martin Thomson for their reviews and suggestions on improving
   this document.

19.  References

19.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC3264]  Rosenberg, J. and H. Schulzrinne, "An Offer/Answer Model
              with Session Description Protocol (SDP)", RFC 3264, June
              2002.

   [RFC4566]  Handley, M., Jacobson, V., and C. Perkins, "SDP: Session
              Description Protocol", RFC 4566, July 2006.

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   [RFC5245]  Rosenberg, J., "Interactive Connectivity Establishment
              (ICE): A Protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT)
              Traversal for Offer/Answer Protocols", RFC 5245, April
              2010.

19.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ivov-mmusic-trickle-ice-sip]
              Ivov, E., Marocco, E., and C. Holmberg, "A Session
              Initiation Protocol (SIP) usage for Trickle ICE", draft-
              ivov-mmusic-trickle-ice-sip-02 (work in progress), June
              2014.

   [I-D.keranen-mmusic-ice-address-selection]
              Keraenen, A. and J. Arkko, "Update on Candidate Address
              Selection for Interactive Connectivity Establishment
              (ICE)", draft-keranen-mmusic-ice-address-selection-01
              (work in progress), July 2012.

   [RFC1918]  Rekhter, Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Groot, G., and
              E. Lear, "Address Allocation for Private Internets", BCP
              5, RFC 1918, February 1996.

   [RFC2543]  Handley, M., Schulzrinne, H., Schooler, E., and J.
              Rosenberg, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 2543,
              March 1999.

   [RFC3261]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston,
              A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E.
              Schooler, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261,
              June 2002.

   [RFC3388]  Camarillo, G., Eriksson, G., Holler, J., and H.
              Schulzrinne, "Grouping of Media Lines in the Session
              Description Protocol (SDP)", RFC 3388, December 2002.

   [RFC3840]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., and P. Kyzivat,
              "Indicating User Agent Capabilities in the Session
              Initiation Protocol (SIP)", RFC 3840, August 2004.

   [RFC4787]  Audet, F. and C. Jennings, "Network Address Translation
              (NAT) Behavioral Requirements for Unicast UDP", BCP 127,
              RFC 4787, January 2007.

   [RFC5389]  Rosenberg, J., Mahy, R., Matthews, P., and D. Wing,
              "Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN)", RFC 5389,
              October 2008.

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   [RFC5766]  Mahy, R., Matthews, P., and J. Rosenberg, "Traversal Using
              Relays around NAT (TURN): Relay Extensions to Session
              Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN)", RFC 5766, April 2010.

   [XEP-0030]
              Hildebrand, J., Millard, P., Eatmon, R., and P. Saint-
              Andre, "XEP-0030: Service Discovery", XEP XEP-0030, June
              2008.

   [XEP-0115]
              Hildebrand, J., Saint-Andre, P., Troncon, R., and J.
              Konieczny, "XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities", XEP XEP-0115,
              February 2008.

   [XEP-0176]
              Beda, J., Ludwig, S., Saint-Andre, P., Hildebrand, J.,
              Egan, S., and R. McQueen, "XEP-0176: Jingle ICE-UDP
              Transport Method", XEP XEP-0176, June 2009.

   [XEP-0278]
              Camargo, T., "XEP-0278: Jingle Relay Nodes", XEP XEP-0278,
              June 2011.

Appendix A.  Open issues

   At the time of writing of this document the authors have no clear
   view on how and if the following list of issues should be addressed.

A.1.  MID/Stream Indices in SDP

   This specification does not currently define syntax for candidate-to-
   stream bindings although it says that they should be implemented with
   MID or a stream index.  Yet, it is reasonable to assume that most
   usages would need to do this within the SDP and it may make sense to
   agree on the format.  Here's one possible way to do this:

         a=mid:1
         a=candidate:1 1 UDP 1658497328 192.168.100.33 5000 typ host
         a=candidate:2 1 UDP 1658497328 96.1.2.3 5000 typ srflx
         a=mid:2
         a=candidate:2 1 UDP 1658497328 96.1.2.3 5002 typ srflx
         a=end-of-candidates

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A.2.  Starting checks

   Normally Vanilla ICE implementations would first activate a check
   list, validate at least one pair in every component and only then
   unfreeze all other checklists.  With trickle ICE this would be
   suboptimal since, candidates can arrive randomly and we would be
   wasting time waiting for a checklist to fill (almost as if we were
   doing vanilla ICE).  We need to decide if unfreezing everything
   solely based on foundation is good enough.

.-.
Pål-Erik