[tcpm] End to End Proprietary Information Field

Increasingly businesses and their workforces are becoming more and more
distributed as they spread globally and move their offices to be closer
to their customers. At the same time, financial wisdom dictates strict
cost control. The combination of which pushed more business to use the
Internet as a transport medium for remote offices and/or employees. 

IP addresses shortage, privacy and security concerns have generated a
myriad of solutions in the form of NATs, PATs, firewalls, etc. As a
result, local information such as private IP addresses, ports and
potentially additional local private information often gets rewritten
and lost when a session traverses these functions. Furthermore, some
gateway services might terminate sessions in order to carry them over a
different medium or using a different service. All of which result in
the same way - lost of end to end transparency. However, occasionally
applications and/or network administrators may need a means to
communicate local private IP information across the Internet domain so
that the far end may be able to process the session correctly. 

I would like to propose creating a proprietary information channel using
a dedicated TCP option that can be used by such application to
communicate private local information across the internet. A flexible
end-to-end private channel will allow Service Providers and application
vendors to provide seamless communication across the Internet domain
despite the many intermediate functions that are in place today.

Sincerely,

Ran Ish-Shalom
Akamai technologies

[tcpm] End to End Proprietary Information Field - Request for a new TCP option