ICMPlle

ICMPlle is a hypothetical extension to the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) proposed in academic and industry discussions to enable low-latency diagnostic messaging in IP networks. It is not an official standard and has no production implementations.

The concept envisions a dedicated family of ICMP messages, designed to carry compact diagnostic data with minimal processing overhead. An ICMPlle message would include a type, a code, and a checksum, followed by a small payload that may contain a timestamp, a short error context, and optional diagnostic data such as interface identifiers or queuing information. The payload would use a compact TLV (type-length-value) structure to limit size and parsing work, with safeguards to avoid amplification or misrouting. The goal is to improve rapid failure localization and telemetry without significantly altering existing ICMP behavior.

History and status: ICMPlle has appeared in speculative discussions and a few laboratory papers from the mid-2010s onward. It has never been advanced to IETF standardization, and there are no widely adopted implementations or vendor offerings.

Security and deployment considerations: Because ICMP is commonly filtered and because additional ICMP messages can be exploited for abuse, proponents emphasize access controls, rate limiting, authentication, and careful deployment in controlled environments. In current practice, ICMPlle remains a conceptual proposal rather than an operational protocol.