eap Mailing List: Re: Ordered delivery of EAP messages

[Bernard Aboba (bernard_aboba]

> Assuming that per session there can only be one outstanding request for an 
> EAP conversation >since the conversation depends on acks from its peer to 
> continue.

ACK/NAK protocols can have more than one packet in flight, if you take false 
retransmissions into account.

> Then if new messages and retries are sent out in any order on the wire they 
> would either be detected by either side as duplicates or processed and 
> handled accordingly regardless of order of receipt.

Both EAP and RADIUS do not detect duplicates arriving out of order; they 
depend on the underlying lower layer to provide in-order delivery so as to 
enable duplicate detection.