IPPM Working Group G. Mirsky
Internet-Draft ZTE Corp.
Intended status: Informational W. Lingqiang
Expires: January 3, 2019 G. Zhui
ZTE Corporation
July 2, 2018
Hybrid Two-Step Performance Measurement Method
draft-mirsky-ippm-hybrid-two-step-01
Abstract
Development of, and advancements in, automation of network operations
brought new requirements for measurement methodology. Among them is
the ability to collect instant network state as the packet being
processed by the networking elements along its path through the
domain. This document introduces a new hybrid measurement method,
referred to as hybrid two-step, as it separates the act of measuring
and/or calculating performance metric from the act of collecting and
transporting network state.
Status of This Memo
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Conventions used in this document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Problem Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Theory of Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Introduction
Successful resolution of challenges of automated network operation,
as part of, for example, overall service orchestration or data center
operation, relies on a timely collection of accurate information that
reflects the state of network elements on an unprecedented scale.
Because performing the analysis and act upon the collected
information requires considerable computing and storage resources,
the network state information is unlikely to be processed by network
elements themselves but will be relayed into the data storage
facilities, e.g. data lakes. The process of producing, collecting
network state information also referred in this document as network
telemetry, and transporting it for post-processing should work
equally well with data flows or injected in the network test packets.
RFC 7799 [RFC7799] describes a combination of elements of passive and
active measurement as a hybrid measurement.
Several technical methods have been proposed to enable collection of
network state information instantaneous to the packet processing,
among them [P4.INT] and [I-D.ietf-ippm-ioam-data].
This document introduces Hybrid Two-Step (HTS) as a new hybrid
measurement method that separates measuring or calculating
performance metric from the collecting and transporting this
information. The Hybrid Two-Step method extends the two-step mode of
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Residence Time Measurement (RTM) defined in [RFC8169] to on-path
network state collection and transport.
2. Conventions used in this document
2.1. Terminology
RTM Residence Time Measurement
ECMP Equal Cost Multipath
MTU Maximum Transmission Unit
HTS Hybrid Two-Step
Network telemetry - the process of collecting and reporting of
network state
2.2. Requirements Language
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
3. Problem Overview
Performance measurements are meant to provide data that characterize
conditions experienced by traffic flows in the network and possibly
trigger operational changes (e.g. - re-route of flows, or changes in
resource allocations). Changes to a network are determined based on
the performance metric information available at the time that a
change is to be made. The correctness of this determination is based
on the quality of the collected metrics data. The quality of
collected measurement data is defined is defined by:
o the resolution and accuracy of each measurement;
o predictability of both the time at which each measurement is made
and the timeliness of measurement collection data delivery for
use.
Consider the case of delay measurement that relies on collecting time
of packet arrival at the ingress interface and time of the packet
transmission at egress interface. The method may be to record a
local clock value on receiving the first octet of an affected message
at the device ingress, and again to record the clock value on sending
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the first byte of the same message at the device egress. In this
ideal case, the difference between the two recorded clock times
corresponds to the time that the message spent in traversing the
device. In practice, the times actually recorded can differ from the
ideal case by any fixed amount and a correction may then be applied
to compute the same time difference taking into account the known
fixed time associated with the actual measurement. In this way, the
resulting time difference reflects any variable delay associated with
queuing.
Depending on the implementation, it may be a challenge to compute the
difference between message arrival and departure times and - on the
fly - add the necessary residence time information to the same
message. And that task may become even more challenging if the
packet is encrypted. Implementations SHOULD NOT record a message
departure time that may be significantly inaccurate in an effort to
include a correlated/computed delay value, in the same message, as a
result of estimating the departure time while including any variable
time component (such as that associated with buffering and queuing of
messages). A similar problem may cause a lower quality of, for
example, information that characterizes utilization of the egress
interface. If unable to obtain the data consistently, without
variable delays for additional processing, information may not
accurately reflect the state at the egress interface. To mitigate
this problem [RFC8169] defined RTM two-step mode.
Another challenge associated with methods that collect network state
information into the actual data packet is the risk to exceed the
Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size, particularly if the packet
traverses overlay domains or VPNs. Since the fragmentation is not
available at the transport network, operators may have to reduce MTU
size advertised to client layer or risk missing network state data
for the part, most probably the latter part, of the path.
4. Theory of Operation
The HTS method consists of the two phases:
o performing a measurement or obtaining network state information,
one or more than one type, on a node;
o collecting and transporting the measurement.
HTS uses HTS Control message to define types of measurement or
network state data collection requested from a node. HTS Control
message may be inserted into the data packet, as meta-data or shim,
or be transmitted in a specially constructed test packet.
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To collect measurement and network state data from the nodes HTS
method uses the follow-up packet. The node that creates the HTS
Control message also originates the HTS follow-up packet. The
follow-up packet contains characteristic information, copied from the
data packet, sufficient for participating nodes to associate it with
the original packet. The exact composition of the characteristic
information is specific for each transport network and its definition
is outside the scope of this document. The follow-up packet also
uses the same encapsulation as the data packet. If not payload but
only network information used to load-balance flows in equal cost
multipath (ECMP), use of the network encapsulation identical to the
data packet should guarantee that the follow-up packet remains in-
band, i.e. traverses the same set of network elements, with the
original data packet. Only one outstanding follow-up packet may be
on the node for the given path. That means that if the node receives
HTS Control message for the flow on which it still waits for the
follow-up packet to the previous HTS Control message, the node will
originate the follow-up packet to transport the former set of the
network state data and transmit it before it transmits the follow-up
packet with the latest set of network state information.
5. IANA Considerations
This document doesn't have any IANA requirements. The section may be
deleted before the publication.
6. Security Considerations
Nodes that practice HTS method are presumed to share a trust model
that depends on the existence of a trusted relationship among nodes.
This is necessary as these nodes are expected to correctly modify the
specific content of the data in the follow-up packet, and the degree
to which HTS measurement is useful for network operation depends on
this ability. In practice, this means that those portions of
messages that contain the network state data cannot be covered by
either confidentiality or integrity protection. Though there are
methods that make it possible in theory to provide either or both
such protections and still allow for intermediate nodes to make
detectable but authenticated modifications, such methods do not seem
practical at present, particularly for protocols that used to measure
latency and/or jitter.
The ability to potentially authenticate and/or encrypt the network
state data for scenarios both with and without the participation of
intermediate nodes that participate in HTS measurement is left for
further study.
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While it is possible for a supposed compromised node to intercept and
modify the network state information in the follow-up packet, this is
an issue that exists for nodes in general - for any and all data that
may be carried over the particular networking technology - and is
therefore the basis for an additional presumed trust model associated
with an existing network.
7. Acknowledgments
TBD
8. References
8.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
8.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-ippm-ioam-data]
Brockners, F., Bhandari, S., Pignataro, C., Gredler, H.,
Leddy, J., Youell, S., Mizrahi, T., Mozes, D., Lapukhov,
P., Chang, R., daniel.bernier@bell.ca, d., and J. Lemon,
"Data Fields for In-situ OAM", draft-ietf-ippm-ioam-
data-03 (work in progress), June 2018.
[P4.INT] "In-band Network Telemetry (INT)", P4.org Specification,
October 2017.
[RFC7799] Morton, A., "Active and Passive Metrics and Methods (with
Hybrid Types In-Between)", RFC 7799, DOI 10.17487/RFC7799,
May 2016, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7799>.
[RFC8169] Mirsky, G., Ruffini, S., Gray, E., Drake, J., Bryant, S.,
and A. Vainshtein, "Residence Time Measurement in MPLS
Networks", RFC 8169, DOI 10.17487/RFC8169, May 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8169>.
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Authors' Addresses
Greg Mirsky
ZTE Corp.
Email: gregimirsky@gmail.com
Wang Lingqiang
ZTE Corporation
No 19 ,East Huayuan Road
Beijing 100191
P.R.China
Phone: +86 10 82963945
Email: wang.lingqiang@zte.com.cn
Guo Zhui
ZTE Corporation
No 19 ,East Huayuan Road
Beijing 100191
P.R.China
Phone: +86 10 82963945
Email: guo.zhui@zte.com.cn
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