Passing Corrupt Data Across Network Layers: An Overview of Recent Developments and Issues

Recent Internet developments seem to make a point for passing corrupt data from the link to the network layer and above instead of ensuring data integrity with a checksum and ARQ. We give an overview of these efforts (the UDP Lite and DCCP protocols) and explain which circumstances would justify delivery of erroneous data; clearly, the missing piece in the puzzle is efficient and meaningful interlayer communication.