[rtcweb] Consent Freshness: Connection liveness/heartbeats

[Christer Holmberg <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I have some questions on the connection liveness/heartbeat section of the draft.


Q1:
===

The text says:

        "Similarly, if packets haven't been received within a certain period,
        an application can request a consent check (heartbeat) be generated."

BUT, if an endpoint is anyway sending consent requests every 5th second, why aren't the those enough as hearbeats? As long as the endpoint receives responses, it knows the remote endpoint is alive (the text even says that an endpoint is considered alive as long as some data is received from it).

And, if the endpoint does NOT receive responses to the consent requests, consent will expire anyway.

I DO understand that an ICE lite may want to send a heartbeat request if it does not receive any data, as it doesn't send consent requests.


Q2:
===

The text says:


        "Sending consent checks (heartbeats) at a high rate could allow a

        malicious application to generate congestion, so applications MUST

        NOT be able to send heartbeats at an average rate of more than 1 per

        second."



I don't think applications should be alowed to generate heartbeats this often, and I see no need for it.


Q3:
===

The spec is unclear on what happens is a response to a heartbeat request is not received. I guess that is an application decision, but I think the spec should be clear that it does NOT have any impact on consent - the "real" consent requests are used to determine.


Regards,

Christer