Re:Internet protocols are changing
by tptacek on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @12:13PM
(#15915585)
The advantage to building on UDP is that it gets through (some) middleboxes; that's what the 4 bytes of port numbers buys you. That, and the fact that UDP is designed to be the TCP/IP escape hatch for things like SCTP that don't want TCP's stream and congestion control semantics.
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So there's no advantage other than getting through broken middleboxes?
No, another advantage is that you can do UDP entirely in userland without privilege.
What allocating a new IP protocol says is pretty close to "all bets are off, and we're carefully taking responsibility for how every system that interacts with TCP/IP headers will handle these packets". Since SCTP doesn't need that, there's no upside. It's vanity and bloody-mindedness.