Coping with distributed monitoring of QoS-enabled heterogeneous networks

Service providers´ portfolio is continuously increasing with emerging real-time services, which are offered to current and new potential clients with an associated fee. In order to properly charge such a fee, both service providers and customers must have guarantees that the offered services are correctly delivered. One way of acquiring on-line information is by monitoring some traffic parameters like one way delay or packet loss. The issue in a real scenario arises when many connections must be monitored, involving diverse underlying network technologies and different Quality of Service policies. This makes broad deployment of a measurement infrastructure very challenging. This paper presents a distributed monitoring infrastructure for tracking the QoS offered by the network. Its novelty resides on efficiently handling the resources to obtain a scalable solution that operates over heterogeneous networks. Traffic aggregation techniques are presented with the purpose of optimising the used network resources. The proposed design has been deployed and validated in a scenario using an European-wide testbed. In particular for this scenario we used heterogeneous network technologies deployed within the framework of the IST EuQoS project. This offers a convenient environment where to examine the feasibility of the solution.