CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Jim McQuaid/Wandel & Goltermann Technologies Minutes of the Benchmarking Methodology Working Group (BMWG) Network Element Benchmarking The first item of discussion was the status of the Internet-Draft on Network Element benchmarking, draft-bmwg-methodology-00.txt. Since this draft is relatively mature, there was not a lot of discussion. The group agreed to move forward towards seeing this issued as an Informational RFC. There will be a final call on the list shortly. Two points were raised, however, with reference to the methodologies described in this draft. In both cases it was agreed that another document should be generated which references the present draft, rather than hold up the present draft and expand it. The first point concerns test of devices which switch, with a focus on call setup overhead in a true switched environment. The discussion raised questions about whether this is management overhead or analogous to routing. Kevin Dubray volunteered to offer a draft about testing issues in this area. The second point concerned testing of congestion and congestion behavior in a network switch. The group felt that many of the issues were covered, at least in a general way, in the present draft. However, there are some particular cases of many to one which merit further attention. Merike Kaeo volunteered to draft a document about testing issues in this area. Benchmarking Methodologies for Overall Network Performance Jim McQuaid spent a few minutes giving an overview of the second Internet-Draft recently posted, draft-bmwg-overallperf-00.txt, describing methods for gross delay testing in a working network using time synchronization. One concept put forward was the idea of using unsynchronized send and receive processes to measure the variance of delay, e.g., by strobing out a test packet every two seconds. Another discussion point centered on ``instrumented traceroute'' e.g., isolating each hop in the cloud for potential discrete delay measurement. After some discussion and comment on the possible issues and value of such testing generally, Jim agreed to continue this discussion on the list with the goal of forwarding an edited draft at the next IETF. Benchmarking For End Systems Rick Jones then presented a fairly extensive set of thoughts on the subject of benchmarking for end systems. His slides follow these minutes. Testing Routing Convergence Some issues around testing routing convergence were raised and discussed, but no further action is to be taken at this time.