The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Rate Measurement Test Protocol Problem Statement and Requirements' (draft-ietf-ippm-rate-problem-10.txt) as Informational RFC This document is the product of the IP Performance Metrics Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Spencer Dawkins and Martin Stiemerling. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ippm-rate-problem/ Technical Summary This memo presents an access rate-measurement problem statement for test protocols to measure IP Performance Metrics. The rate measurement scenario has wide-spread attention of Internet access subscribers and seemingly all industry players, including regulators. Key test protocol aspects require the ability to control packet size on the tested path and enable asymmetrical packet size testing in a controller-responder architecture. Working Group Summary A controversial topic regards the level of requirement for the capability to control asymmetric packet sizes in two-way testing architectures. A few participants felt that the document should not require asymmetric packet sizes, even though there are a number of cases where it would appear asymmetric packets sizes would be essential to measure the path capacity accurately. As a compromise, the author updated the document to require asymmetric packet rate generation, and both symmetric and asymmetric packet sizes are recommended. The many circumstances where asymmetric packet size testing is needed are documented, and many of these circumstances would be unknown prior to comparative tests using symmetric and asymmetric packet sizes. Document Quality The draft was reviewed by many members of WG. There are already standards track protocol extension proposals that respond to the requirements in this draft. At least one protocol solution has been implemented and deployed. Personnel The document shepherd is Bill Cerveny. The responsible area director is Spencer Dawkins.
