Sending probe traffic for OAM purposes is often not feasible. OAM probe traffic adds additional load to both the end-point as well as to the network, tampering measurements and creating an additional burden for low-power networks. In addition, routers forward OAM differently from regular data traffic (slow-path vs. fast path). Packet scheduling algorithms, especially for balancing traffic across equal cost paths or links, often leverage information contained within the packet, such as protocol number, IP-address or MAC-address. Probe packets would thus either need to be sent from the exact same endpoints with the exact same parameters, or probe packets would need to be artificially constructed as "fake" packets and inserted along the path. Both approaches are sometimes not feasible from an operational perspective, be it that access
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