[Dart] ICE might send your traffic over TCP

[Jonathan Lennox <[e-mail]>]

This is the point I brought up at the mic today about ICE and TCP candidates.

ICE, effectively (in the modes used for RTP and the like, i.e. as used in WebRTC-style contexts), presents an API as though it’s sending datagrams.  However, because ICE includes TCP candidates (both ICE-TCP and TURN-TCP), sometimes this “datagram" traffic will end up actually going over TCP instead, and depending on your implementation this will often be invisible to the higher-level code.

When this happens, it would be a bad thing if the low-level per-packet DSCP markings you were trying to use on UDP were applied to the TCP connection.  Even beyond the usual problems with mixing DSCP markings on a TCP connection, these framed TCP streams are usually created in userspace, so the packetization you expected from your API won’t be the packetization of the TCP on the wire.

How (say) a WebRTC implementation should handle API requests for multiple drop precedences when the underlying ICE channel is TCP is unclear to me.

Jonathan Lennox