Re: [Tsvwg] [SCTP checksum problems]

[Qiaobing Xie <xieqb@cig.mot.com>]

Hi, all,

Please correct me if I am under the wrong impression, but what I've been
hearing so far from the discussion in this thread seems to be:

 1) There is uncertainty on what error model should be used for
    evaluating transport error check mechanisms;

 2) iSCSI level integrity/authentication seems inevitable not matter how
    strong the transport error check is;

 3) Some uncertainty about the implementation cost (hw and sw) on some
    of the proposed CRC-based schemes, but almost certainly any 
    CRC-based scheme will be more expensive than checksum schemes;

 4) Discussion of requirements has been so far very much limited to
    iSCSI data transport, and it seems that a CRC-based scheme is 
    strongly desirable for iSCSI case _if_ the transport error check 
    alone is all we will get to meet the iSCSi requirements.

Now my question to the group is: if a weaker but much cheaper SCTP error
checking mechanism can be found to be sufficient to the majority of the
applications (remember SCTP is a general purpose transport), and the
ultra-low error rate applications such as iSCSI will eventually rely on
their own integrity check, should we adopt a selection approach which
put more emphasis on the ease-of-implementation side?

(Maybe after all the Adler-32 in the current RFC2960 is good enough :-)
)

regards,
-Qiaobing