The IETF RTFM Working Group

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g., routing, transport, security, etc.). One of those working groups is the ``Realtime Traffic Flow Measurement Charter'' (RTFM). This working group has three main objectives:

1.

Review existing work in traffic flow measurement, including that of the RMON and internet accounting working groups and published work from independent researchers.

2.

Produce an improved Traffic Flow Model considering at least the following:

• Efficient hardware implementation
• Effect of IPv6 on traffic measurement
• Extension of the accounting model to widen the range of measurable quantities
• Simpler ways to specify flows of interest
• Maintain existing focus on data reduction capabilities

3.

Develop the Flow Meter MIB as a ``standards track'' document with the IETF.

The groups current chairs are Nevil Brownlee (University of Auckland), Greg Ruth (GTE) and Sig Handelman (IBM). So far, the group has contributed several Internet Drafts [38]. Three of them have meanwhile become RFCs [4,5,27]. Those RFCs describe a proposal for an architecture for flow measurement (in [27]) as well as a formal specification for a traffic meter in ASN.1 notation, the ``Meter MIB'' [4]. Nevil Brownlee also provides a first implementation of the architecture in a set of programs called ``NeTraMet'' (Network Traffic Meter), ``NeMaC'' (NeTraMet Manager/Collector) and ``nifty'' (a graphical network traffic flow analyzer). In [5] he describes the experiences that were made with this set of programs.