Overview of IP FPM

Definition

IP Flow Performance Measurement (FPM) is a Huawei-proprietary feature that measures packet loss rate and delay of end-to-end service packets transmitted on an IP network. This feature is easy to deploy and provides an accurate assessment of network performance.

Purpose

As IP services are more widely used, fault diagnosis and end-to-end service quality analysis are becoming an increasingly pressing concern for carriers. However, absence of effective measures prolongs fault diagnosis and increases the workload. Currently, carriers use network quality analysis (NQA) and Y.1731 to measure the quality of services running on IP radio access networks (RANs).

Both measures, however, have their own shortcomings.

NQA measures network performance by determining the packet loss rate of simulated packets, but not actual service packets transmitted on networks. The performance counters collected by NQA may not represent the actual service quality, and therefore cannot serve as a solid reference for network performance analysis.
Y.1731 measures only Layer 2 Ethernet network performance, but not performance of networks spanning different layers.
Neither NQA nor Y.1731 can be used on multipoint-to-multipoint (MP2MP) networks or monitor end-to-end networks at different layers, and therefore are not effective for monitoring IP network performance.

IP FPM does not have any of these shortcomings. IP FPM measures service packets to assess IP network performance and monitors services in real time for network diagnosis in P2P, P2MP, and load balancing scenarios.

Benefits

IP FPM offers the following benefits to carriers:

Allows carriers to use the network management system (NMS) to monitor the network running status to determine whether the network quality complies with the service level agreement (SLA).
Allows carriers to promptly adjust services based on measurement results to ensure proper transmission of voice and data services, improving user experience.