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Traditional (RFC1191) Path MTU Discovery
121340970 RFC 1191 describes a method for a sender to detect the Path MTU to a given receiver. (121340970 RFC 1981 describes the equivalent for IPv6.) The method works as follows:
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This method is widely implemented, but is not robust in today's Internet because it relies on ICMP packets sent by routers along the path. Such packets are often suppressed either at the router that should generate them (to protect its resources) or on the way back to the source, because of firewalls and other packet filters or rate limitations. These problems are described in 121340970RFC 2923. When packets are lost due to MTU issues without any ICMP "Too Big" message, this is sometimes called a (MTU) black hole. Some operating systems have added heuristics to detect such black holes and work around them. Workarounds can include lowering the MTU estimate or disabling PMTUD for certain destinations.
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An IETF Working Group (pmtud) was chartered to define a new mechanism for Path MTU Discovery to solve these issues. This process resulted in RFC 4821, Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery ("PLPMTUD"), which was published in March 2007. This scheme requires cooperation from a network layer above IP, namely the layer that performs "packetization". This could be TCP, but could also be a layer above UDP, let's say an RPC or file transfer protocol. PLPMTUD does not require ICMP messages. The sending packetization layer starts with small packets, and probes progressively larger sizes. When there's an indication that a larger packet was successfully transmitted to the destination (presumably because some sort of ACK was received), the Path MTU estimate is raised accordingly.
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