Cisco Service-Level Assurance Protocol
RFC 6812

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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
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.

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