scope:

The scope of this Recommendation covers performance monitoring in RTP networks with the involvement of ITU-T H.248 entities. Performance monitoring as such is a network service across multiple network entities which are located in user, control and/or management planes. The scope of this Recommendation is limited to the user/control/management plane interfaces of ITU-T H.248 entities. The notion of performance monitoring is used to emphasize a call/session dependent service, which is basically in contrast to the legacy performance management capability, which is a pure management plane function (see [ITU-T M.3010] and [ITU-T M.60]).

Performance monitoring could be considered as a network overlay function.

This Recommendation provides:

- an overview of the existing "entire ITU-T H.248 toolkit" for RTCP extended report (XR) support, i.e., the set of available ITU-T H.248 packages in that area

- an overview of available ITU-T H.248 packages for non-XR related performance metrics, typically subject to RTCP basic report (SR, RR) capabilities

- example network use cases with different ITU-T H.248 MG types (primarily physical-to- RTP gateways, media-agnostic IP-to-IP gateways, RTP-topology-aware RTP-to-RTP gateways)

- a collection of functional requirements in order to motivate associated profile guidelines

- a classification of performance metrics (such as application-level versus transport-level metrics) in order to indicate applicability or not for ITU-T H.248 MGs

- the following principal ITU-T H.248 MG tasks:

○ measurement of RTP traffic

○ reporting of measurement data via RTCP XR reports

○ collection of RTCP XR carried measurement data

○ loopback of RTP (in order to relocate a measurement point)

○ filtering of RTCP XR reports ○ modification of RTCP XR reports and/or reporting of measurement data via ITU-T H.248 statistics to the MGC

○ control of such tasks via [ITU-T H.248] that could be addressed in an ITU-T H.248 profile, i.e.,

• the identification of appropriate ITU-T H.248 packages

• the detailed specification of package usage

• the example call-dependent procedures

- the association to other related ITU-T H.248.x Recommendations such as [ITU-T H.248.71], [ITU-T H.248.79], [ITU-T H.248.85] and [b-ITU-T H.248.88]

- control of measurement methods (such as interval, cumulative and alert type of measurements)

- usage of ITU-T H.248.47-based conditional reporting [ITU-T H.248.47].

This Recommendation also discusses the purpose of performance monitoring (and therefore the possible motivation of a use case). For example:

- capture of grade-of-service (GoS) related data in order to evaluate network conditions 

- capture of quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) related data in order to evaluate service conditions (e.g., as part of service level agreements)

- capture of billing/charging related data

- capture of data as input for routing algorithms

- capture of data as input for network node selection algorithms

- capture of data as input for centralized servers as support of network operations

- capture of data as part of online tests.