The Two-Way Active Management Protocol (TWAMP), described in RFC 5357, is an

extension of the One-Way Active Management Protocol (OWAMP) that supplies two-way
or round-trip measurements instead of unidirectional capabilities. Two-way
measurements are helpful because round-trip delays do not require host clock
synchronization and remote support might be a simple echo function. However, the
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo Request/Reply (used by ping) for this
purpose has several shortcomings. TWAMP defines an open protocol for measuring two-
way or round-trip metrics with greater accuracy than other methods by using time-
stamps (processing delays can be factored as well).

Usually, TWAMP operates between interfaces on two devices playing specific roles.
TWAMP is often used to check Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance, and the
TWAMP feature is often presented in that context. TWAMP uses two related protocols,
running between several defined entities: TWAMP-Control�Initiates, starts, and ends
test sessions. The TWAMP-Control protocol runs between a Control-Client and a TWAMP
Server. TWAMP-Test�Exchanges test packets between two TWAMP entities. The TWAMP-
Test protocol runs between a Session-Sender and a Session-Reflector.

Although four different TWAMP devices can perform the four logical roles of TWAMP
Control-Client, Server, Session-Sender, and Session-Reflector, different devices
can play different roles. A common implementation combines the roles of Control-
Client and Session-Sender in one device (known as the TWAMP controller or TWAMP
client) and the roles of Server and Session-Reflector in the other device (known as
the TWAMP responder or TWAMP server). In this case, each device runs both the
TWAMP-Control (between Control-Client and Server) and TWAMP-Test (between Session-
Sender and Session-Reflector) protocols.