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How to determine the message length or size of a diameter message?

+4 votes
1,263 views

From Wireshark Packet capture how the Diameter "Length' field calculation value arrive for the diameter message size.
My query is :
1. Does it take into account all the AVPs used in the Diameter Request/Response Message.

posted Feb 1, 2016 by Chinmoy Padhi

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1 Answer

+1 vote

Attached is the diameter header followed by AVPs, Message Length is 24 bit field which contains the Size of the Diameter message including the header fields. (I hope I understood the problem correctly)

Diameter Header

answer Feb 1, 2016 by Salil Agrawal
Thanks Salil, I want to determine the size of CCRequest message. So if we see the CCR message in capture it won't be 24 bits, may be more than that. So I want to know how it arrive at that value.I tried to add all the AVPs in CCRequest message and didn't get the exact message size for that request message. Let say you have Diameter header Length whose value is 500 bytes and sum of All AVPs in the CCRequest message comes to 480. I am not sure my understanding is correct or not.May be if you look into a capture you will surely come up with correct idea.
Thanks
Chinmoy
Your understanding is correct header size is 20 bytes so if message length is 500 then all AVP would be 480 bytes (500-20).
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+3 votes

I have a couple of questions about maximum message size in Diameter.

A Diameter message header has a 3 byte length indicator, so a maximum message length of 16777215. I don't see any way for Diameter node to advertise support for a smaller message length. Does that mean that a node is expected to support a message length up to 0xffffff? Or is it free to impose its own upper limit and reject (send an error) if the message is too long?

Meanwhile, in RFC6083 (DTLS/SCTP):
However, the following limitations still apply:

The maximum user message size is 2^14 bytes, which is the DTLS limit.

Am I reading this correctly that this limits Diameter message lengths to 2^14 when using DTLS/SCTP? Or is there some kind of workaround to this limitation?

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