ICE

This document describes "Trickle ICE", an extension to the Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) protocol that enables ICE agents to begin connectivity checks while they are still gathering candidates, by incrementally exchanging candidates over time instead of all at once. This method can considerably accelerate the process of establishing a communication session.

This document describes Session Description Protocol (SDP) Offer/Answer procedures for carrying out Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) between the agents.

This document obsoletes RFCs 5245 and 6336.

The Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) protocol describes a Network Address Translator (NAT) traversal mechanism for UDP-based multimedia sessions established with the Offer/Answer model. The ICE extension for Incremental Provisioning of Candidates (Trickle ICE) defines a mechanism that allows ICE Agents to shorten session establishment delays by making the candidate gathering and connectivity checking phases of ICE non-blocking and by executing them in parallel.

This document defines usage semantics for Trickle ICE with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The document also defines a new SIP Info Package to support this usage together with the corresponding media type. Additionally, a new Session Description Protocol (SDP) "end-of-candidates" attribute and a new SIP option tag "trickle-ice" are defined.

During the process of establishing peer-to-peer connectivity, Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) agents can encounter situations where they have no candidate pairs to check, and, as a result, conclude that ICE processing has failed. However, because additional candidate pairs can be discovered during ICE processing, declaring failure at this point may be premature. This document discusses when these situations can occur.

This document updates RFCs 8445 and 8838 by requiring that an ICE agent wait a minimum amount of time before declaring ICE failure, even if there are no candidate pairs left to check.

This document provides guidelines on how to make Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) conclude faster in multihomed and IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack scenarios where broken paths exist. The provided guidelines are backward compatible with the original ICE specification (see RFC 5245).

This document describes a protocol for Network Address Translator (NAT) traversal for UDP-based communication. This protocol is called Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE). ICE makes use of the Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) protocol and its extension, Traversal Using Relay NAT (TURN).

This document obsoletes RFC 5245.

Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) defines a mechanism for NAT traversal for multimedia communication protocols based on the offer/answer model of session negotiation. ICE works by providing a set of candidate transport addresses for each media stream, which are then validated with peer-to-peer connectivity checks based on Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN). ICE provides a general framework for describing candidates but only defines UDP-based media streams. This specification extends ICE to TCP-based media, including the ability to offer a mix of TCP and UDP-based candidates for a single stream. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This specification defines a media feature tag and an option tag for use with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The media feature tag allows a User Agent (UA) to communicate to its registrar that it supports ICE. The option tag allows a UA to require support for ICE in order for a call to proceed. [STANDARDS-TRACK]