5.5. Issues for Other Transport Protocols

Some transport protocols are not allowed to repacketize when doing a retransmission. That is, once an attempt is made to transmit a segment of a certain size, the transport cannot split the contents of the segment into smaller segments for retransmission. In such a case, the original segment can be fragmented by the IP layer during retransmission. Subsequent segments, when transmitted for the first time, should be no larger than allowed by the Path MTU.

Path MTU Discovery for IPv4 [RFC1191] used NFS as an example of a UDP-based application that benefits from PMTU Discovery. Since then, [RFC7530] states that the supported transport layer between NFS and IP must be an IETF standardized transport protocol that is specified to avoid network congestion; such transports include TCP, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) [RFC4960], and the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) [RFC4340]. In this case, the transport is responsible for ensuring that transmitted segments (except probes) conform to the Path MTU, including supporting PMTU Discovery probe transmissions as needed.