Open architecture for quality of service monitoring at a National Research and Education Network

Abstract

The Portuguese National Research and Education Network (NREN) has a set of proprietary appliances for Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring probes within its backbone, very much dependant both on hardware and software details. Nowadays, several open source QoS mon- itoring systems and some Network Performance Measurement and Mon- itoring tools, developed both by G EANT and Internet2 member institu- tions, are available. This work presents an open software architecture for generic hardware probes, based upon PerfSONAR framework, for QoS monitoring and an associated management solution for software con g- uration and automatized distribution. This new architecture has been tested and deployed in a NREN backbone and QoS data has been gath- ered and integrated into the NREN's database. This paper discusses this open source solution for NREN QoS monitoring, the clock synchroniza- tion issues and, nally, discusses the results obtained in a real testbed deployment in the Portuguese NREN backbone.