[MMUSIC] Why do we need rtcp-mux-exclusive?

Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> Fri, 04 March 2016 00:00 UTC

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From: Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2016 15:59:32 -0800
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Subject: [MMUSIC] Why do we need rtcp-mux-exclusive?
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I've been reading this document and I'm finding myself confused about
why we need it.

As I understand it, the current state of play is that mux-only
endpoints will send offers with both a=rtcp-mux and one set of
candidates for each m= line (and with trickle, perhaps no candidates
in the initial offer).  If that offer is processed by a non-mux
endpoint, that endpoint will reject rtcp-mux and then eventually you
end up with a failure to negotiate transport connections because there
will never be RTCP-candidates.


What this draft seems to offer is that a way for the mux-only endpoint
to indicate that it is mux-only, so that non-mux endpoints can instead
fail the connection immediately (section 4.3). So you get a hard
failure instead of a transport failure. Is that correct so far?

If so, here's my problem: because unknown a= lines are ignored, old
endpoints won't know about rtcp-mux-exclusive and so they will just
ignore it. Thus, this attribute is only useful for *new* endpoints
which don't want to do mux (but do know about this attribute). I
suppose that endpoints like that might exist (maybe gateways) but I'm
skeptical that it's worth extra effort to have a hard fail here.

What am I missing here?
-Ekr