Efficiently Monitoring Bandwidth and Latency in IP Networks

Effective monitoring of network utilization and performance indicators is a key enabling technology for proactive and reactive resource management, flexible accounting, and intelligent planning in next-generation IP networks. This paper addresses the challenging problem of efficiently monitoring bandwidth utilization and path latencies in an IP data network. Unlike earlier approaches, the measurement architecture assumes a single point-of-control in the network that is responsible for gathering bandwidth and latency information using widely-deployed management tools, like SNMP, RMON/NetFlow, and explicitly-routed IP probe packets.