Network Working Group                                          A. Morton
Internet-Draft                                                 AT&T Labs
Intended status: Standards Track                       February 29, 2012
Expires: September 1, 2012


                   Rate Measurement Problem Statement
                   draft-morton-ippm-rate-problem-02

Abstract

   There is a rate measurement scenario which has wide-spread attention
   of users and seemingly all industry participants, including
   regulators.  This memo presents an access rate-measurement problem
   statement for IP Performance Metrics.  Key aspects require the
   ability to control packet size on the tested path and enable
   asymmetrical packet size testing in a controller-responder
   architecture.

Requirements Language

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

Status of this Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on September 1, 2012.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal



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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   2.  Purpose and Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   3.  Active Rate Measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
   4.  Measurement Method Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   5.  Test Protocol Control & Generation Requirements . . . . . . . . 7
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
   7.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
   8.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
   9.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
     9.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
     9.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8



























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1.  Introduction

   There are many possible rate measurement scenarios.  This memo
   describes one rate measurement problem and presents a rate-
   measurement problem statement for IP Performance Metrics (IPPM).

   The access-rate scenario or use case has wide-spread attention of
   users and seemingly all industry participants, including regulators.
   It is being approached with many different measurement methods.


2.  Purpose and Scope

   The scope and purpose of this memo is to define the measurement
   problem statement for access rate measurement on production networks.
   We characterize this scenario as follows:

   o  Rates at the edge of the network are several orders of magnitude
      less than aggregation and core portions.

   o  Asymmetrical ingress and egress rates are prevalent.

   o  Extremely large scale of access services requires low complexity
      devices participating at the user end of the path.

   Today, the majority of widely deployed access services achieve rates
   less than 100 Mbit/s, and this is the rate-regime for which a
   solution is sought now.

   This problem statement assumes that the most-likely bottleneck device
   or link is adjacent to the remote (user-end) measurement device, or
   is within one or two router/switch hops of the remote measurement
   device.

   Other use cases for rate measurement involve situations where the
   packet switching and transport facilities are leased by one operator
   from another and the actual capacity available cannot be directly
   determined (e.g., from device interface utilization).  These
   scenarios could include mobile backhaul, Ethernet Service access
   networks, and/or extensions of a layer 2 or layer 3 networks.  The
   results of rate measurements in such cases could be employed to
   select alternate routing, investigate whether capacity meets some
   previous agreement, and/or adapting the rate of certain traffic
   sources if a capacity bottleneck is found via the rate measurement.
   In the case of aggregated leased networks, available capacity may
   also be asymmetric.  In these cases, the tester is assumed to have a
   sender and receiver location under their control.  We refer to this
   scenario below as the aggregated leased network case.



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   Only active measurement methods will be addressed here, consistent
   with the IPPM working group's current charter.  Active measurements
   require synthetic traffic dedicated to testing, and do not use user
   traffic.

   A key consideration is whether active measurements will be conducted
   with user traffic present (In-Service Testing), or not present (Out-
   of-Service Testing), such as during pre-service testing or
   maintenance that interrupts service temporarily.  Out-of-Service
   testing includes activities described as "service commissioning",
   "service activation", and "planned maintenance".  Both In-Service and
   Out-of-Service Testing are within the scope of this problem.

   It is a non-goal to solve the measurement protocol specification
   problem in this memo.

   It is a non-goal to standardize methods of measurement in this memo.
   However, the problem statement will mandate that support for one or
   more categories of rate measurement methods and adequate control
   features for the methods in the test protocol.


3.  Active Rate Measurement

   This section lists features of active measurement methods needed to
   measure access rates in production networks.

   Test coordination between Source and Destination devices through
   control messages and other basic capabilities described in the
   methods of IPPM RFCs [RFC2679][RFC2680] are taken as given (these
   could be listed later, if desired).

   Most forms of active testing intrude on user performance to some
   degree.  One key tenet of IPPM methods is to minimize test traffic
   effects on user traffic in the production network.  Section 5 of
   [RFC2680] lists the problems with high measurement traffic rates, and
   the most relevant for rate measurement is the tendency for
   measurement traffic to skew the results, followed by the possibility
   to introduce congestion on the access link.  Obviously, categories of
   rate measurement methods that use less active test traffic than
   others with similar accuracy SHALL be preferred for In-Service
   Testing.

   On the other hand, Out-of-Service Tests where the test path shares no
   links with In-Service user traffic have none of the congestion or
   skew concerns, but must address other practical concerns such as
   conducting measurements within a reasonable time from the tester's
   point of view.  Out-of-Service Tests where some part of the test path



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   is shared with In-Service traffic MUST respect the In-Service
   constraints.

   The **intended metrics to be measured** have strong influence over
   the categories of measurement methods required.  For example, using
   the terminology of [RFC5136], a it may be possible to measure a Path
   Capacity Metric while In-Service if the level of background (user)
   traffic can be assessed and included in the reported result.

   The measurement *architecture* MAY be either of one-way (e.g.,
   [RFC4656]) or two-way (e.g., [RFC5357]), but the scale and complexity
   aspects of end-user or aggregated access measurement clearly favor
   two-way (with low-complexity user-end device and round-trip results
   collection, as found in [RFC5357]).  However, the asymmetric rates of
   many access services mean that the measurement system MUST be able to
   assess each direction of transmission.  In the two-way architecture,
   it is expected that both end devices MUST include the ability to
   launch test streams and collect the results of measurements in both
   (one-way) directions of transmission (this requirement is consistent
   with previous protocol specifications, it is not a unique problem for
   rate measurements).

   The following paragraphs describe features for the roles of test
   packet SENDER, RECEIVER, and results REPORTER.

   SENDER:

   Ability to generate streams of test packets with various
   characteristics as desired (see Section 4).  The SENDER may be
   located at the user end of the access path, or may be located
   elsewhere in the production network, such as at one end of an
   aggregated leased network segment.

   RECEIVER:

   Ability to collect streams of test packets with various
   characteristics (as described above), and make the measurements
   necessary to support rate measurement at the other end of an end-user
   access or aggregated leased network segment.

   REPORTER:

   Ability to use information from test packets and local processes to
   measure delivered packet rates.







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4.  Measurement Method Categories

   The design of rate measurement methods can be divided into two
   phases: test stream design and measurement (SENDER and RECEIVER), and
   a follow-up phase for analysis of the measurement to produce results
   (REPORTER).  The measurement protocol that addresses this problem
   MUST only serve the test stream generation and measurement functions.

   For the purposes of this problem statement, we categorize the many
   possibilities for rate measurement stream generation as follows;

   1.  Packet pairs, with fixed intra-pair packet spacing and fixed or
       random time intervals between pairs in a test stream.

   2.  Multiple streams of packet pairs, with a range intra-pair spacing
       and inter-pair intervals.

   3.  One or more packet ensembles in a test stream, using a fixed
       ensemble size in packets and one or more fixed intra-ensemble
       packet spacings (including zero).

   4.  One or more packet chirps, where intra-packet spacing typically
       decreases between adjacent packets in the same chirp and each
       pair of packets represents a rate for testing purposes.

   For all categories, the test protocol MUST support:

   1.  Variable payload lengths among packet streams

   2.  Variable length (in packets) among packet streams or ensembles

   3.  Variable header markings among packet streams

   4.  Variable number of packets-pairs, ensembles, or streams used in a
       test session

   are additional variables that the test protocol MUST be able to
   communicate.

   The test protocol SHALL support test packet ensemble generation
   (category 3), as this appears to minimize the demands on measurement
   accuracy.  Other stream generation categories are OPTIONAL.

   Measurements for each test packet transferred between SENDER and
   RECEIVER MUST be compliant with the singleton measurement methods
   described in IPPM RFCs [RFC2679][RFC2680] (these could be listed
   later, if desired).  The time-stamp information or loss/arrival
   status for each packet MUST be available for communication to the



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   protocol entity that collects results.


5.  Test Protocol Control & Generation Requirements

   Essentially, the test protocol MUST support the measurement features
   described in the sections above.  This requires:

   1.  Communicating all test variables to the Sender and Receiver

   2.  Results collection in a one-way architecture

   3.  Remote device control for both one-way and two-way architectures

   4.  Asymmetric and/or pseudo-one-way test capability in a two-way
       measurement architecture

   The ability to control packet size on the tested path and enable
   asymmetrical packet size testing in a two-way architecture are
   REQUIRED.

   The test protocol SHOULD enable measurement of the [RFC5136] Capacity
   metric, either Out-of-Service, In-Service, or both.  Other [RFC5136]
   metrics are OPTIONAL.


6.  Security Considerations

   The security considerations that apply to any active measurement of
   live networks are relevant here as well.  See [RFC4656] and
   [RFC5357].

   There may be a serious issue if a proprietary Service Level Agreement
   involved with the access network segment provider were somehow leaked
   in the process of rate measurement.  To address this, test protocols
   SHOULD NOT convey this information in a way that could be discovered
   by unauthorized parties.


7.  IANA Considerations

   This memo makes no requests of IANA.


8.  Acknowledgements

   Dave McDysan provided comments and text for the aggregated leased use
   case.  Yaakov Stein suggested many considerations to address,



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   including the in-service vs. out-of-service distinction and its
   implication on test traffic limits.


9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC1305]  Mills, D., "Network Time Protocol (Version 3)
              Specification, Implementation", RFC 1305, March 1992.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC2679]  Almes, G., Kalidindi, S., and M. Zekauskas, "A One-way
              Delay Metric for IPPM", RFC 2679, September 1999.

   [RFC2680]  Almes, G., Kalidindi, S., and M. Zekauskas, "A One-way
              Packet Loss Metric for IPPM", RFC 2680, September 1999.

   [RFC4656]  Shalunov, S., Teitelbaum, B., Karp, A., Boote, J., and M.
              Zekauskas, "A One-way Active Measurement Protocol
              (OWAMP)", RFC 4656, September 2006.

   [RFC5357]  Hedayat, K., Krzanowski, R., Morton, A., Yum, K., and J.
              Babiarz, "A Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP)",
              RFC 5357, October 2008.

   [RFC5618]  Morton, A. and K. Hedayat, "Mixed Security Mode for the
              Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP)", RFC 5618,
              August 2009.

   [RFC5938]  Morton, A. and M. Chiba, "Individual Session Control
              Feature for the Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol
              (TWAMP)", RFC 5938, August 2010.

   [RFC6038]  Morton, A. and L. Ciavattone, "Two-Way Active Measurement
              Protocol (TWAMP) Reflect Octets and Symmetrical Size
              Features", RFC 6038, October 2010.

9.2.  Informative References

   [RFC5136]  Chimento, P. and J. Ishac, "Defining Network Capacity",
              RFC 5136, February 2008.







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Author's Address

   Al Morton
   AT&T Labs
   200 Laurel Avenue South
   Middletown,, NJ  07748
   USA

   Phone: +1 732 420 1571
   Fax:   +1 732 368 1192
   Email: acmorton@att.com
   URI:   http://home.comcast.net/~acmacm/







































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