Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-ippm-btc-framework-01.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 07:44:24 -0400

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		: Empirical Bulk Transfer Capacity
	Author(s)	: M. Mathis, M. Allman
	Filename	: draft-ietf-ippm-btc-framework-01.txt
	Pages		: 9
	Date		: 30-Jun-99
	
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.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ippm-btc-framework-01.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the username
"anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After logging in,
type "cd internet-drafts" and then
	"get draft-ietf-ippm-btc-framework-01.txt".

A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html 
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt

Internet-Drafts can also be obtained by e-mail.

Send a message to:
	[email-masked].
In the body type:
	"FILE /internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ippm-btc-framework-01.txt".
	
NOTE:	The mail server at ietf.org can return the document in
	MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility.  To use this
	feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE"
	command.  To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack" or
	a MIME-compliant mail reader.  Different MIME-compliant mail readers
	exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
	"multipart" MIME messages (i.e. documents which have been split
	up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation on
	how to manipulate these messages.

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.