Reducing Fragmentation of Packets in a Networking Environment

摘要

Automated techniques reduce packet fragmentation in a communications network environment, including a networking environment that uses tunnels. In a tunneling environment, a tunnel endpoint evaluates whether tunnel processing for an outbound packet will cause the packet to exceed a particular size such as a message transmission unit (“MTU”) size, which in turn would lead to error processing and/or fragmentation of the packet. Similar MTU and packet mismatch may occur in a system across the virtual machine and the hypervisor, a networking stack and the physical MTU possible on the network. If so, the tunnel endpoint or the network driver simulates an error condition and returns an error message to the protocol stack that prepared the packet, so that the packet size can be reduced before the packet is actually sent on the tunnel. Existing functionality is leveraged to perform the size reduction, thus obviating the need for administrator intervention.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method for reducing packet fragmentation in a tunneling environment, comprising:
receiving, at a tunnel endpoint of an outbound tunnel, a packet prepared for transmission to a network, wherein data values to be added by the tunnel endpoint are absent from the prepared packet; determining, by the tunnel endpoint, whether a size of the received packet exceeds a threshold, wherein the threshold accounts for the data values to be added by the tunnel endpoint, in view of a maximum packet size for packets prepared for transmission to the network; and responsive to determining that the size of the received packet exceeds the threshold, generating, by the tunnel endpoint, a simulated error condition and sending an error message to a preparer of the received packet, the error message adapted to automatically cause the preparer to reformat payload data of the packet into a smaller-sized packet and then send the smaller-sized packet to the tunnel endpoint for transmission to the network.