Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) A. Morton
Request for Comments: 6248 AT&T Labs
Obsoletes: 4148 April 2011
Updates: 4737, 5560, 5644, 6049
Category: Informational
ISSN: 2070-1721
RFC 4148 and the IP Performance Metrics (IPPM) Registry of Metrics
Are Obsolete
Abstract
This memo reclassifies RFC 4148, "IP Performance Metrics (IPPM)
Metrics Registry", as Obsolete, and withdraws the IANA IPPM Metrics
Registry itself from use because it is obsolete. The current
registry structure has been found to be insufficiently detailed to
uniquely identify IPPM metrics. Despite apparent efforts to find
current or even future users, no one responded to the call for
interest in the RFC 4148 registry during the second half of 2010.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6248.
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Copyright Notice
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Action to Reclassify RFC 4148 and the Corresponding IANA
Registry as Obsolete ............................................3
3. Security Considerations .........................................4
4. IANA Considerations .............................................4
5. Acknowledgements ................................................4
6. References ......................................................5
6.1. Normative References .......................................5
6.2. Informative References .....................................5
1. Introduction
The IP Performance Metrics (IPPM) framework [RFC2330] describes
several ways to record options and metric parameter settings, in
order to account for sources of measurement variability. For
example, Section 13 of [RFC2330] describes the notion of "Type P" so
that metrics can be specified in general, but the specifics (such as
payload length in octets and protocol type) can replace P to
disambiguate the results.
When the IPPM Metrics Registry [RFC4148] was designed, the
variability of the "Type P" notion, and the variability possible with
the many metric parameters (see Section 4.2 of [RFC2679]), were not
fully appreciated. Further, some of the early metric definitions
only indicate Poisson streams [RFC2330] (see the metrics in
[RFC2679], [RFC2680], and [RFC3393]), but later work standardized the
methods for Periodic Stream measurements [RFC3432], adding to the
variability possible when characterizing a metric exactly.
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It is not believed to be feasible or even useful to register every
possible combination of Type P, metric parameters, and Stream
parameters using the current structure of the IPPM Metrics Registry.
The IPPM Metrics Registry is believed to have very few users, if any.
Evidence of this was provided by the fact that one registry entry was
syntactically incorrect for months after [RFC5644] was published.
The text ":=" was used for the metrics in that document instead of
datatracker.ietf.org