nanog mailing list archives

Re: real-world data about fragmentation


From: Jennifer Rexford <jrex () CS Princeton EDU>
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 15:30:11 -0400

This isn't a direct answer to the question, but I find this paper pretty useful (even though it is dated now):

  Beyond Folklore: Observations on Fragmented Traffic
  by Colleen Shannon, David Moore, and k claffy
  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, December 2002
  http://www.caida.org/publications/papers/2002/Frag/frag.pdf

(Bill, I'd be curious to see your AINTEC slides, too.)

-- Jen

  
On Apr 2, 2014, at 2:50 PM, bmanning () vacation karoshi com wrote:


I can send you a copy of an invited presentation at AINTEC from 2009.

/bill


On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 02:14:22PM -0400, Joe Abley wrote:
Hi all,

It's common wisdom that a datagram that needs to be fragmented between endpoints (because it is bigger than the path 
MTU) will demonstrate less reliable delivery and reassembly than a datagram that doesn't need to be fragmented, 
because math, firewall, other, take your pick.

Is anybody aware of any wide-scale studies that examine the probability of fragmentation of datagrams of different 
sizes?

For example, I could reasonable expect an IPv4 packet of 576 bytes not to be fragmented very often (to choose a size 
not at random). The probability of a 10,000 octet IPv4 packet getting fragmented seems likely to be 100%, if we're 
talking about arbitrary paths across the Internet.

What does the curve look like between 576 bytes and 10,000 bytes?

I might expect exciting curve action around 1500 bytes (because ethernet), 1492 (PPPoE), 1480 (GRE), etc. But I'm 
interested in actual data.

Anybody have any pointers? IPv4 and IPv6 are both interesting.


Joe



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