RFC 2679 (rfc2679) - Page 2 of 20

A One-way Delay Metric for IPPM

RFC 2679            A One-way Delay Metric for IPPM       September 1999


   +  Using this singleton metric, a 'sample', called Type-P-One-way-
      Delay-Poisson-Stream, will be introduced to measure a sequence of
      singleton delays measured at times taken from a Poisson process.

   +  Using this sample, several 'statistics' of the sample will be
      defined and discussed.

   This progression from singleton to sample to statistics, with clear
   separation among them, is important.

   Whenever a technical term from the IPPM Framework document is first
   used in this memo, it will be tagged with a trailing asterisk.  For
   example, "term*" indicates that "term" is defined in the Framework.

2.1. Motivation:

   One-way delay of a Type-P* packet from a source host* to a
   destination host is useful for several reasons:

   +  Some applications do not perform well (or at all) if end-to-end
      delay between hosts is large relative to some threshold value.

   +  Erratic variation in delay makes it difficult (or impossible) to
      support many real-time applications.

   +  The larger the value of delay, the more difficult it is for
      transport-layer protocols to sustain high bandwidths.

   +  The minimum value of this metric provides an indication of the
      delay due only to propagation and transmission delay.

   +  The minimum value of this metric provides an indication of the
      delay that will likely be experienced when the path* traversed is
      lightly loaded.

   +  Values of this metric above the minimum provide an indication of
      the congestion present in the path.

   The measurement of one-way delay instead of round-trip delay is
   motivated by the following factors:

   +  In today's Internet, the path from a source to a destination may
      be different than the path from the destination back to the source
      ("asymmetric paths"), such that different sequences of routers are
      used for the forward and reverse paths.  Therefore round-trip
      measurements actually measure the performance of two distinct
      paths together.  Measuring each path independently highlights the
      performance difference between the two paths which may traverse



Almes, et al.               Standards Track