Describing Telemetry Systems with the Metadata Description Language

Abstract

The integrated Network-Enhanced Telemetry (iNET) project has developed standards to enhance telemetry systems for the twenty-first century. A foundational component of these standards is the Metadata Description Language (MDL). MDL is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based language for describing requirements, design choices, and configuration parameters of a Telemetry Network System (TmNS). Within a TmNS, MDL guides the exchange of information between applications and the configuration of network devices. Recent initial evaluations assessed MDL in terms of the expressive power of the language and the level of effort in developing applications that utilize MDL Instance Documents. Performing these initial evaluations required the generation of MDL Instance Documents to describe scenarios representative of both near-term and future telemetry systems that express different levels of iNET interoperability. These initial evaluations determined quantitative metrics such as file size, memory requirements, and required parsing time for MDL Instance Documents, and further evaluations judged the efficacy and complexity of MDL for describing and configuring a TmNS.