Keep-alive's will flood a constrained network

[eelcocramer]

Hi,

I've been experimenting with Telehash lately. I've been looking how I can use Telehash in a constrained 6lowpan network. As I could not find my way in the C implementation I used the current javascript implementation to get to know the stack and APIs.

One thing I noticed that when I'm using the UDP transport is that every 30 seconds it would send a burst of traffic on the network. After some digging I found that this was because of keep alive messages that are send to keep NAT mappings active. However, as I use ipv6 I would not need NAT and the keep-alive seem to be to frequent.

Now I found a way to change the timeout. But I was wondering the keep-alive handshake period should be present in the specs or that it should be left upon the developer to choose the right keep-alive period for his application? Or was the UDP transport never intended to be used over a constrained network and would there be a need for a new transport for 6lowpan networks?

Thanks & happy hollidays,
Eelco