Technical Summary
The Alternate Marking method, as presented in RFC 8321, can be
applied only to point-to-point flows because it assumes that all the
packets of the flow measured on one node are measured again by a
single second node. This document aims to generalize and expand this
methodology to measure any kind of unicast flows, whose packets can
follow several different paths in the network, in wider terms a
multipoint-to-multipoint network. For this reason the technique here
described is called Multipoint Alternate Marking.
Working Group Summary
The draft was first submitted in June 2017, has been reviewed by a fair
number of people in the IPPM working group, has had a fair number of
supporters, and no objections from the working group. The main comments
included clarification questions regarding the description of the
measurement procedure and about some of the figures in the document.
The draft was adopted by the working group in November 2018. During
working group last call the draft had a fair number of supporting WG
members, with relatively minor comments, and these comments were
addressed by the authors.
Document Quality
The authors of this draft have implemented a prototype of the methodology
using Open vSwitch in the Mininet emulation environment. The
implementation is publicly available, and some experimental evaluation
has been published by the authors ("Multipoint Passive Monitoring in Packet
Networks", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking). The current version of
the draft is clear, seems to have resolved all the issues, and has the consensus
of the working group.
Personnel
The document shepherd is Tal Mizrahi, and the responsible area director is Mirja Kühlewind.