Overview of TWAMP

Definition

The Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP) is a technology that measures the round-trip performance of an IP network.

TWAMP uses UDP packets to collect statistics about the delay, jitter, and packet loss rate. In addition, TWAMP intelligently separates session control and traffic measurement to provide high security.

TWAMP uses the client/server mode.

The client establishes, starts, and stops a TWAMP session, and generates and maintains statistics about the IP network performance.
The server responds to the client's request to establish, start, or stop a TWAMP session.

Purpose

As networks rapidly develop and applications widely apply, various services are deployed to meet requirements in different scenarios. Therefore, networks encounter increasingly higher requirements for statistics collection. A tool that rapidly provides statistics about IP network performance is in urgent need.

Traditionally, network elements (NEs) themselves generate and maintain statistics about the IP network performance. To display statistics about the performance of an entire network, a network management system (NMS) is required to manage multiple NEs and collect statistics about these NEs. However, there may be no NMS deployed or the NMS may be incapable of collecting statistics.

TWAMP is therefore introduced. NEs themselves no longer need to generate or maintain statistics about the IP network performance. The performance management system manages only the TWAMP client and easily obtains statistics about the entire network.

TWAMP has the following advantages over the traditional tools that collect statistics about IP network performance:

TWAMP is a standard protocol that has a unified measurement model and packet format, facilitating deployment.
Multiprotocol Label Switching Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) Operation, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) can be deployed only on MPLS-TP networks, whereas TWAMP can be deployed on IP networks, MPLS networks, and Layer 3 virtual private networks (L3VPNs).
Compared with IP Flow Performance Measurement (FPM), TWAMP boasts stronger availability and easier deployment and requires no clock synchronization.

Therefore, TWAMP applies to the scenario in which statistics about the IP network performance must be rapidly obtained but not necessarily be highly accurate.

Benefits

TWAMP offers the following benefits to carriers:

TWAMP enables carriers to rapidly and flexibly obtain statistics about the performance of the entire network when the NMS is incapable of collecting such statistics.
TWAMP can be configured to collect statistics when the IP network does not support clock synchronization.