IPv6 Essentials

4.9. Path MTU Discovery

With IPv4, every router can fragment packets if needed. If a router cannot forward a packet because the MTU of the next link is smaller than the packet it has to send, the router fragments the packet. It cuts it into slices that fit the smaller MTU and sends it out as a set of fragments. The packet is then reassembled at the final destination. Depending on the network design, an IPv4 packet may be fragmented more than once during its travel through the network.

With IPv6, routers do not fragment packets anymore; the sender takes care of it. Path MTU discovery tries to ensure that a packet is sent using the largest possible size that is supported on a certain route. The Path MTU is the smallest link MTU of all links from a source to a destination. The discovery of the Path MTU is described in RFC 1981.

The discovery process works like this. First, a host assumes that the Path MTU is the same as the MTU of the first hop link and it uses that size. If the packet is too big for a certain router along the path to deliver the packet to the next link, the router discards the packet and sends back an ICMPv6 Packet Too Big message. Recall that this message type includes the MTU size of the next hop link. The host now uses this MTU for sending further packets to the same destination. The host will never go below the IPv6 minimum MTU size of 1280 bytes, however. The process of receiving a Packet Too Big message and reducing the size of the packets can happen more than once before the packet reaches its destination. The discovery process ends when the packets arrive at the final destination.

The path from a given source to a given destination can change, and so can the Path MTU. Smaller MTU sizes are discovered by getting Packet Too Big messages. An IPv6 host will try to increase the MTU size from time to time in order to be able to detect a larger Path MTU. Path MTU discovery also supports multicast destinations. If the destination is multicast, there are many paths that copies of the packets may travel, and each path can have a different Path MTU. Packet Too Big messages will be generated just as with a unicast destination, and the packet size used by the sender is the smallest Path MTU of the whole set of destinations.