Multipoint Alternate-Marking Method for Passive and Hybrid Performance Monitoring

The Alternate Marking method, as presented in RFC 8321 [RFC8321], can be applied only to point-to-point flows because it assumes that all the packets of the flow measured on one node are measured again by a single second node. This document aims to generalize and expand this methodology to measure any kind of unicast flows, whose packets can follow several different paths in the network, in wider terms a multipoint-to-multipoint network. For this reason the technique here described is called Multipoint Alternate Marking. Some definitions here introduced extend the scope of RFC 5644 [RFC5644] in the context of alternate marking schema.