All,
At the end of last year, TERENA announced the establishment of a new Task
Force for European Traffic Metrics (TF-ETM). The first meeting was due to
be held in January, but due to various circumstances, unfortunately had to
be cancelled. TERENA appreciates there is a great deal of interest in this
subject and would like to re-schedule this meeting for Thursday, 24th April
1997 at the TERENA offices in Amsterdam .
Kevin Hoadley of UKERNA has kindly agreed to lead the new task force, which
will also be assisted by Kevin Meynell, a TERENA Project Development
Officer. Networking professionals from academic, governmental or commercial
sectors are all welcome to attend TF-ETM.
Attached below are the proposed activities of TF-ETM. There is also a
mailing list that can be joined by sending mail to mailserver(a)terena.nl
containing only the text subscribe tf-etm <your real name>. A Web Page will
be available shortly.
If you would like to attend this meeting, or wish to obtain some more
information, please e-mail Kevin Meynell (meynell(a)terena.nl)
Apologies to anyone who receives multiple copies of this message.
Regards,
Kevin Meynell
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In order to address the problem of predicting the growth of network traffic
and its consequences for performance, many network operators already
collect basic statistics on their own network's performance and traffic
flows. However there is no data available for national-level comparisons
with other networks' performance. The objective of the proposed project is
to collect and analyze data which will enable technicans to focus on the
causes of decreased performance, and propose corrective
actions. The activities will include the development of a mechanism and
structure for collecting statistics of traffic loads on an end to-end
international level, measurements of delays, flow capacity and packet loss
information.
The vacuum created in national-level statistics/metrics collection has
significantly complicated planning by TERENA members and service providers.
While detailed traffic and performance measurements are essential to
identifying the causes of network
problems and formulating corrective actions, it is trend analysis and
accurate network/system monitoring which permits network managers to
identify 'hot spots', predict problems before they occur, and identify ways
to avoid them by efficient deployment of resources and optimising of
network configuration. As the explosive growth and dependence on the
information infrastructure continues, it is critical that mechanisms be
established to enable infrastructure planning and analysis.
It is proposed to address these problems on two levels of relevance:
significance to analysis of network performance, and relevance to Internet
settlements. The activities will then include cross-European measurements
of total traffic through specified links and the mapping of reachable
destinations covered by a route, delay measurements, flow capacity,
continental averages of hops, and rate of packet loss monitoring. These
measurements will be conducted using publicly available software packages.
