[jdev] questions about gsoc: file transfer over jingle

[Justin Karneges]

On Saturday 27 March 2010 01:35:18 Zhenchao Li wrote:
> the problem: AFAIK there isn't an XEP defined for
> ICE-TCP<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-mmusic-ice-tcp-08>,
> it's a work in progress. What we have is one for
> ICE-UDP<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0176.html>.
> But unlike voice or video transmission, file transfer needs to ensure
> packet integrity, which rules out FT using ICE-UDP only. Implementing a
> ICE-TCP stack requires much design and careful implementation, and even
> sounds like another gsoc project. After some search I find that the libnice
> library implements ICE-UDP as well as a "pseudo TCP
> implementation"<http://nice.freedesktop.org/libnice/pt03.html>.
> Perhaps that's one viable way to transfer file?(At the risk of rewriting
> this transport method sometime in the furture when ICE-TCP is
> standardized.)

IMO, we should prefer "pseudo TCP" together with ICE-UDP if we need a reliable 
stream, instead of ICE-TCP, as it is more likely to succeed without needing 
to use a relay service.  This way, file transfer would operate just as well 
as voice/video transmission, instead of being slower or failing.

ICE-TCP is still useful (clean usage and transition to IPv6, or for networks 
that block UDP), but just not nearly as useful.

-Justin