The major goal of the Benchmarking Methodology Working Group is to make a series of recommendations concerning the measurement of the performance characteristics of various internetworking technologies; further, these recommendations may focus on the systems or services that are built from these technologies. Each recommendation will describe the class of equipment, system, or service being addressed; discuss the performance characteristics that are pertinent to that class; clearly identify a set of metrics that aid in the description of those characteristics; specify the methodologies required to collect said metrics; and lastly, present the requirements for the common, unambiguous reporting of benchmarking results. To better distinguish the BMWG from other measurement initiatives in the IETF, the scope of the BMWG is limited to technology characterization using simulated stimuli in a laboratory environment. Said differently, the BMWG does not attempt to produce benchmarks for live, operational networks. Moreover, the benchmarks produced by this WG shall strive to be vendor independent or otherwise have universal applicability to a given technology class. Because the demands of a particular technology may vary from deployment to deployment, a specific non-goal of the Working Group is to define acceptance criteria or performance requirements. An ongoing task is to provide a forum for discussion regarding the advancement of measurements designed to provide insight on the operation inter-networking technologies. In addition to its current work plan, the BMWG is explicitly tasked to develop benchmarks and methodologies for the following technologies: * MPLS Forwarding: Develop specific methods to characterize the latency and forwarding performance of MPLS devices, extending the fundamental recommendations of RFC 1242 and RFC 2544 to this networking technology. * SIP Networking Devices: Develop new terminology and methods to characterize the key performance aspects of network devices using SIP, including the signaling plane scale and service rates while considering load conditions on both the signaling and media planes. This work will be harmonized with related SIP performance metric definitions prepared by the PMOL working group.