A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the IP Performance Metrics Working Group of the IETF.
Title : A Framework for Defining Empirical Bulk Transfer
Capacity Metrics
Author(s) : M. Mathis, M. Allman
Filename : draft-ietf-ippm-btc-framework-05.txt
Pages : 9
Date : 01-Mar-01
Bulk Transport Capacity (BTC) is a measure of a network's ability to
transfer significant quantities of data with a single
congestion-aware transport connection (e.g., TCP). The intuitive
definition of BTC is the expected long term average data rate (bits
per second) of a single ideal TCP implementation over the path in
question. However, there are many congestion control algorithms
(and hence transport implementations) permitted by IETF standards.
This diversity in transport algorithms creates a difficulty for
standardizing BTC metrics because the allowed diversity is
sufficient to lead to situations where different implementations
will yield non-comparable measures -- and potentially fail the
formal tests for being a metric.
This document defines a framework for standardizing multiple BTC
metrics that parallel the permitted transport diversity. Two
approaches are used. First, each BTC metric must be much more
tightly specified than the typical IETF protocol. Pseudo-code or
reference implementations are expected to be the norm. Second, each
BTC methodology is expected to collect some ancillary metrics which
are potentially useful to support analytical models of BTC.
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