OWAMP (One-Way Active Measurement Tool)

OWAMP is a command line client application and a policy daemon used to determine one way latencies between hosts. It is an implementation of the OWAMP protocol (see references) that is currently going through the standardization process within the IPPM WG in the IETF.

With roundtrip-based measurements, it is hard to isolate the direction in which congestion is experienced. One-way measurements solve this problem and make the direction of congestion immediately apparent. Since traffic can be asymmetric at many sites that are primarily producers or consumers of data, this allows for more informative measurements. One-way measurements allow the user to better isolate the effects of specific parts of a network on the treatment of traffic.

References

• Internet2 Web page about OWAMP - http://e2epi.internet2.edu/owamp/
• RFC 4656, A One-way Active Measurement Protocol (OWAMP), S. Shalunov, B. Teitelbaum, A. Karp, J. Boote, M. Zekauskas, September 2006

Example using owping (OWAMP v2.0)

welti@lsmp2:/usr/local/etc$ owping ezmp3.switch.ch
Approximately 12.9 seconds until results available

--- owping statistics from [2001:620:0:110:20b:cdff:fece:668f]:44281 to [ezmp3.switch.ch]:38795 ---
SID: fe001719c7dbaae10331c219780aebdb
100 sent, 0 lost (0.0%), 0 duplicates
one-way delay min/median/max = 1.83/1.9/1.87 ms, (err=495 ms)
one-way jitter = 0 ms (P95-P50)
TTL not reported
no reordering


--- owping statistics from [ezmp3.switch.ch]:38796 to [2001:620:0:110:20b:cdff:fece:668f]:44282 ---
SID: fece668fc7dbaae104661ae797c510a6
100 sent, 0 lost (0.0%), 0 duplicates
one-way delay min/median/max = 1.62/1.7/1.66 ms, (err=495 ms)
one-way jitter = 0 ms (P95-P50)
TTL not reported
no reordering

-- ChrisWelti - 03 Apr 2006 -- SimonLeinen - 29 Mar 2006