Path MTU, IP Fragmentation and MSS

Last few weeks, I've been involved troubleshooting high latency on SATCOM and 3G infrastructure. Long story short, I found that when in UDP, the "Dont Fragment (DF)" bit is set to 1. Therefore, I would like to write about Path MTU discovery and IP Fragmentation in this post and the relation between them.

As per example topology above, if the host LINUX1 is sending a packet to LINUX3 device. Packet has to go through a path in which there are various MTU sizes involved.

Path MTU is; assume packet, which is leaving LINUX1 has total length of 1450 bytes. Because the link between LINUX1-LINUX2 has 1500 bytes limit, there is no problem. However, once LINUX2 receives the packet, it sees that the link that it must use to forward this packet has a lower maximum packet capacity than the packet it has. Under normal circumstances, LINUX2 sends back an ICMP notification to LINUX1 and says that “Hey dude, I can’t forward this packet as I have a link having 800 bytes MTU on the way, do something and lower your packet size”

LINUX1 gets this ICMP and lowers its further packets’ maximum sizes to 800 then the packets flow through. Why doesn’t it occur? This is what documents say if the next link MTU is lower than the packet being forwarded, packets are fragmented.

Now the Path MTU discovery comes in: