Purpose
In the all-IP era, various services sensitive to network performance indicators are transmitted through an IP network, for example, voice and video services. To detect packet loss and find out packet loss points on the network, Y.1731 and Network Quality Analysis (NQA) are used. However, the two technologies have the following defects:
- Y.1731 applies to Layer 2 Ethernet networks, so it does not support performance statistics collection on Layer 3 networks.
- Y.1731 and NQA collect statistics on service packets by simulating or inserting detection flows into service flows. The detection flows increase loads on devices and cannot reflect the real status of user services.
- Y.1731 and NQA cannot collect performance statistics on end-to-end networks at different layers.
iPCA was specially developed by Huawei for both Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks, and has the following differences against Y.1731 and NQA:
- iPCA applies to both Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
- iPCA marks on service packets to obtain packet loss ratio and statistics, without occupying bandwidth.
- iPCA supports packet loss statistics collection on multipoint-to-multipoint networks.