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Abstract : |
introduction The Internet is rapidly growing in number of users, traffic volume, and topological complexity. At the same time it is increasingly driven by economic competition. These developments render it more difficult, and yet more critical, to characterize network usage and workload trends, and point to the need for a high performance monitoring system that can provide workload data to Internet users and administrators. To ensure the practicality of using the monitor at variety of locations, implementation on low cost, commodity hardware is a necessity. In its role as the network service provider for NSF?s vBNS (very high speed Backbone Network Service) project, MCI has undertaken the development of an OC3 based monitor to meet these needs. We will describe and demonstrate our current prototype. The goal of the project is to specifically accommodate three incompatible trends: current widely used statistics gathering tools, largely FDDI and Ethernet based, are running out of gas, so scaling to higher speeds is difficult ATM trunks at OC3c are increasingly used for high volume backbone trunks and interconnects detailed flow based analysis is important to understanding usage patterns and growth trends, but, |
