Practical early detection of performance degradation in aggregated traffic links

The growth of Internet traffic and the many different traffic classes that exist make network performance control extremely difficult for operators. The methods available rely on complex or costly hardware. However, recent research on bandwidth sharing has introduced methods that require only basic statistics of aggregated link utilization, such as mean and variance. This data can be easily obtained through SNMP calls, lowering the cost of monitoring systems. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no tools have yet been developed to implement these methods. This paper presents the implementation of a plugin for the monitoring environment Nagios and the validation of a degradation detection tool from link utilization traces. The plugin does not require complex or costly hardware for acquiring data. Instead, it employs basic SNMP data about link utilization.