Proposed WG Benchmarking & Performance Measurements (bpm)

WG Name Benchmarking & Performance Measurements
Acronym bpm
Area Operations and Management Area (ops)
State Proposed
Charter charter-ietf-bpm-00-02 Start Chartering/Rechartering (Internal Steering Group/IAB Review)
Document dependencies
Personnel Area Director Mohamed Boucadair
Mailing list Address ippm@ietf.org, bmwg@ietf.org
Archive
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/bpm

Charter for proposed Working Group

Scope

The Benchmarking & Performance Measurements Working Group (BPM WG) develops and maintains metrics, methodologies, and protocols that can be applied to the quality, performance, reliability, and scalability of data delivery services and applications running over public and private networks using IETF technologies. These metrics, methodologies, and protocols are designed so that they can be used by network operators and end users in production or independent testing groups in lab environments.

The methodologies cover data, control, and management planes and they apply to hardware, virtualized, and containerized network infrastructure (such as Data Center network fabrics, controllers, routers, and firewalls), including Network Management software systems and endpoints in production and lab environments. In lab environments, the testing procedures ensure consistent, reproducible, and reportable benchmarking results including system calibration. In production environments, measurement and system calibration procedures ensure that production management, control, and data plane performance impact is minimized. The metrics defined by the BPM WG are intended to provide unbiased, quantitative performance measurements and will follow the guidance in BCP 170 (Guidelines for Considering New Performance Metric Development). The benchmarks produced by the BPM WG will not define acceptance criteria or performance requirements and shall strive to be vendor independent or otherwise have universal applicability to a given technology class.

The BPM WG fosters commonality and comparability of metrics and measurements across IETF protocols at different layers. The WG is also responsible for documenting guidance for methodologies and measurement protocols, including guidance to guarantee that the methods do not directly affect Internet security and privacy. In addition, the WG provides guidance on the interpretation of measurement results and the use of relevant operational context.

Work Items

The WG is responsible for the development and maintenance of Standards Track or Experimental documents specifying active, passive, and hybrid performance measurement protocols, methodologies, and metrics. The WG will also produce Informational or Best Current Practices (BCP) terminology documents and recommendations on key performance characteristics of internetworking technologies, on frameworks for assessing these characteristics, and on benchmarks for network devices, systems, and services. In addition, the WG will publish Standards Track or Experimental documents specifying performance-related manageability properties such as YANG data models for configuration and operation, and IPFIX entities for Network Telemetry data export.

The work scope is limited to protocols, methodologies, and metrics that are applicable to the IP and MPLS data plane and upper-layer protocols. Work involving Layer 2 protocols is in scope when it applies IETF-defined benchmarking and performance measurement mechanisms to Layer 2 technologies. The BPM WG does not specify encapsulations required for measurements over non-IP and non-MPLS layers.

The WG is responsible for the maintenance of RFCs published by the concluded BMWG and IPPM WGs (including updating those published as Proposed Standard to Internet Standard and Informational to BCP) and the maintenance of BCP 170.

In general, the WG requires an implementation for Standards Track documents. In some cases (e.g., security fixes or simple extensions) a proof of implementation might not be needed. Whenever such an exception applies, the exception justification must be included in the specification document or its shepherd's write-up.

Relationship With Existing WGs and Coordination

The WG will follow transport-related BCPs (mainly, BCP 133 on Specifying New Congestion Control Algorithms, BCP 145 on UDP Usage Guidelines, and BCP 208 on Network Transport Circuit Breakers) and will seek advice from the WIT area as needed.

The WG coordinates generic benchmarking and performance measurement efforts within the IETF and, therefore, it specifically communicates with other WGs such as MPLS, INTAREA, 6MAN, and SPRING, where related data plane encapsulations are specified. Also, the WG will seek feedback on topics related to other OPS WGs such as V6OPS or SRV6OPS. The WG will involve the security area for advice and guidance on relevant issues (e.g., integrity protection). The WG closely collaborates with the Performance Metrics Directorate per the guidance in BCP 170.

Proposed milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
May 2027 Submit Benchmarking Methodology for Intra-domain and Inter-domain Source Address Validation to the IESG for publication (Informational) draft-ietf-bmwg-savnet-sav-benchmarking
Apr 2027 Submit On-Path Telemetry for Active Performance Measurements to the IESG for publication (Informational) draft-ietf-ippm-on-path-active-measurements
Apr 2027 Submit On-Path Telemetry YANG Data Model to the IESG for publication (Standards Track) draft-ietf-ippm-on-path-telemetry-yang
Mar 2027 Submit Update of the Simple Two-way Active Measurement Protocol Class-of-Service Extension - ECN to the IESG for publication (Standards Track) draft-ietf-ippm-stamp-cos-ecn
Mar 2027 Submit RFC7799bis to the IESG for publication (Best Current Practice)
Feb 2027 Submit Characterization and Benchmarking Methodology for Power in Networking Devices to the IESG for publication (Informational) draft-ietf-bmwg-powerbench
Jan 2027 Submit IPv6 Performance and Diagnostic Metrics Version 2 (PDMv2) Destination Option to the IESG for publication (Standards Track) draft-ietf-ippm-encrypted-pdmv2
Dec 2026 Submit Considerations for Benchmarking Network Performance in Containerized Infrastructures to the IESG for publication (Informational) draft-ietf-bmwg-containerized-infra
Nov 2026 Submit Alternate Marking Deployment Framework to the IESG for publication (Informational) draft-ietf-ippm-alt-mark-deployment
Nov 2026 Submit A YANG Data Model for the Alternate-Marking Method to the IESG for publication (Standards Track) draft-ietf-ippm-alt-mark-yang
Oct 2026 Send LSes to ITU-T, IEEE, 3GPP, and BBF about BPM
Oct 2026 Submit Simple Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (STAMP) Extensions for Reflecting STAMP Packet IP Headers to the IESG for publication (Standards Track) draft-ietf-ippm-stamp-ext-hdr