Sessions and Measurements

Session Overview

A session is an abstraction of measurement and is constituted by one sender, one or more receiver(s) and a packet stream configuration. Moreover, a session has a lifetime (duration) and result reporting mechanism. The figure below depicts some of the session properties as a 3D graph to simplify the visualization of the number of session varieties.

Note: Some combinations may not be realistic and valid, e.g. 'zapping' on an unicast packet streams is not supported, neither realistic.

· Session Content

The session content is projected on the 'Y'-axis and is grouped into three service groups Data, VoIP and IPTV. The session content describes the measurement packet stream configuration, e.g. protocol/encapsulation (USP, TCP, SCTP, etc), frame size and packet rate (bandwidth), etc.

· Session Addressing

A session can be configured to use Unicast (point-to-point) or Multicast (one-to-many) addressing scheme. Session addressing is shown in the 'Z'-axis.

· Session Types

The session type is shown in the 'X'-axis and defines five different session types. The session types are described in more detail in the next coming chapters.