Information Model and XML Data Model for Traceroute Measurements

IETF announced the availability of a new draft in the online Internet
Drafts directories. "Information Model and XML Data Model for
Traceroute Measurements" is a work item produced by members of the
IP Performance Metrics Working Group of the IETF. The IETF IPPM Working
Group Working Group was chartered to develop a set of standard metrics
that can be applied to the quality, performance, and reliability of
Internet data delivery services. These metrics are designed such that
they can be performed by network operators, end users, or independent
testing groups. Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool used to
determine the hop by hop path from a source to a destination and the
Round Trip Time (RTT) from the source to each hop. Traceroute can be
therefore used to discover some information (hop counts, delays, etc.)
about the path between the initiator of the traceroute measurement
and other hosts. Typically, the traceroute tool attempts to discover
the path to a destination by sending UDP probes with specific
time-to-live (TTL) values in the IP packet header and trying to elicit
an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each gateway along the path to
some host. Traceroutes are being used by lots of measurement efforts,
either as an independent measurement or to get path information to
support other measurement efforts. That is why there is the need to
standardize the way the configuration and the results of traceroute
measurements are stored. The standard metrics defined by IPPM working
group in matter of delay, connectivity and losses do not apply to the
metrics returned by the traceroute tool; therefore, in order to compare
results of traceroute measurements, the only possibility is to add to
the stored results a specification of the operating system and version
for the traceroute tool used. This document, in order to store results
of traceroute measurements and allow comparison of them, defines a
standard way to store them using a XML schema. Section 7 contains the
XML schema to be used as a template for storing and/or exchanging
traceroute measurements information. The schema was designed in order
to use an extensible approach based on templates (similar to how IPFIX
protocol is designed) where the traceroute configuration elements
(both the requested parameters, Request, and the actual parameters used,
MeasurementMetadata) are metadata to be referenced by results information
elements (data) by means of the TestName element (used as unique
identifier). Currently Open Grid Forum (OGF) is also using this
approach and cross- requirements have been analyzed. The XML schema
is compatible with OGF schema since it was designed in a way that both
limits the unnecessary redundancy and a simple one-to-one transformation
between the two exist.