University of Delaware The aim of this document is to define a small set of metrics that are robust, easy to understand, orthogonal, relevant, and easy to compute. The IPPM WG has defined a large number of richly parameterized metrics because network measurement has many purposes. Often, the ultimate purpose is to report a concise set of metrics describing a network's current state to an end user. It is for this purpose that the present set of metrics is defined, and the document is principally concerned with "short-term" reporting considerations (a few seconds or minutes as opposed to days, months or years.)