RFC 8838: Trickle ICE

by Peter Saint-Andre

2021-01-21

Way back in 2005 some folks at Google and other parts of the Jabber community started to define a technology for setting up voice and video calls over XMPP, which we called Jingle. Unlike similar methods used in relation to SIP, Jingle enabled endpoints to dynamically gather and exchange potential connection paths for NAT traversal within context of the Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE). The original name for this was "dribbling" to differentiate it from the offer/answer method defined in RFC 3264 (wherein an endpoint needs to gather all of its candidate IP addresses up front before sending the offer). Over time the IETF defined a similar method for SIP, too, which we generalized under the name Trickle ICE. This week the IETF published a document cluster containing dozens of RFCs related to WebRTC, including RFC 8838 for Trickle ICE (which I co-authored with Emil Ivov of Jitsi and Justin Uberti of Google). Enjoy!

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