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 monitoring systems and some Network Performance Measurement and Monitoring tools, developed both by GÉANT and Internet2 member institutions, 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 configuration and automatized distribution. This new architecture has been tested and deployed in a NREN backbone and QoS data has been gathered and integrated into the NREN’s database. This paper discusses this open source solution for NREN QoS monitoring, the clock synchronisation issues and, finally, discusses the results obtained in a real testbed deployment in the Portuguese NREN backbone.