Cisco Service-Level Assurance Protocol
RFC 6812
Independent Submission M. Chiba
Request for Comments: 6812 A. Clemm
Category: Informational S. Medley
ISSN: 2070-1721 J. Salowey
S. Thombare
E. Yedavalli
Cisco Systems
January 2013
Cisco Service-Level Assurance Protocol
Abstract
Cisco's Service-Level Assurance Protocol (Cisco's SLA Protocol) is a
Performance Measurement protocol that has been widely deployed. The
protocol is used to measure service-level parameters such as network
latency, delay variation, and packet/frame loss. This document
describes the Cisco SLA Protocol Measurement-Type UDP-Measurement, to
enable vendor interoperability.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other
RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at
its discretion and makes no statement about its value for
implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by
the RFC Editor are not 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/rfc6812.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2013 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
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
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Chiba, et al. Informational [Page 1]
RFC 6812 Cisco Service-Level Assurance Protocol January 2013
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Control Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.1.1. Control-Request Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1.1.1. Command-Header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.1.1.2. CSLDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.1.2. Control-Response Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.2. Measurement Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4. Implementation Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
5. Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.1. Message Authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.2. IPsec Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.2.1. Control Traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.2.2. Measurement Traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.3. Replay Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Chiba, et al. Informational [Page 2]
RFC 6812 Cisco Service-Level Assurance Protocol January 2013
1. Introduction
Active network performance measurements are becoming critical data
points for administrators monitoring the health of the network. As
service providers look to differentiate their offerings, performance
measurement is increasingly becoming an important tool to monitor
service-level guarantees and, in general, to monitor the health of a
network.
Performance metrics, both one-way and two-way, can be used for pre-
deployment validation as well as for measuring in-band live network-
performance characteristics. It can be used to measure service
levels in L2 and L3 networks as well as for applications running on
top of L3. Active performance measurements are gathered by analyzing
synthetically generated request and response packets or frames. This
is in contrast to passive measurements that analyze live traffic
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