CATS Metrics Definition

Computing-Aware Traffic Steering (CATS) is a traffic engineering approach that optimizes the steering of traffic to a service instance by considering the dynamic state of computing and network resources. To enable such decisions, CATS components exchange metrics that describe resource conditions affecting service instance selection. This document focuses on compute and communication metrics for CATS and defines a hierarchical abstraction of these metrics to improve interoperability, scalability, and operational simplicity. It does not aim to standardize raw infrastructure (Level 0) metrics; instead, it specifies higher-level representations that can be derived from raw measurements using aggregation and normalization functions.