Technical Summary
This document describes protocol independent methods called Explicit
Host-to-Network Flow Measurement Techniques that can be applicable to
transport-layer protocols between client and server. These methods
employ just a few marking bits inside the header of each packet for
performance measurements and require collaborative client and server.
Both endpoints cooperate by marking and, possibly, mirroring
information back and forward on the round-trip connection. The
techniques are especially valuable when applied to protocols that
encrypt transport headers, since they enable loss and delay
measurements by passive on-path network devices. Different
techniques are considered within this document.
Working Group Summary
Like most IPPM documents, this represents strong concurrence
from part of the WG and acquiescence from the remainder.
Document Quality
While this is not a protocol document per se, there are implementations of
the mechanisms described in the document.
Akamai and Orange have implemented setting and reading of L and Q bits for
loss measurements for QUIC traffic.
The open source tool spindump by Ericsson research contains logic for reading
bits of most proposals in this document.
Telecom Italia have implemented setting of delay, RT-loss etc in a forked QUIC
implementation. They have also extended spindump and integrated it in
measurement tools.
Huawei have expressed interest in implementing mechanisms described in the
document.
Personnel
The Document Shepherd for this document is Marcus Ihlar. The Responsible
Area Director is Martin Duke.
IESG Note
This information draft is a merger of 6 (!) different drafts, accounting for the over-long author list.