Simple Active Mechanisms for Measuring and Monitoring Service Level Topologies

Whether driven by security concerns, need for flexibility, deployment of advanced services or as a simplified outsourcing model, overlaying a virtual service topology over the underlying network infrastructure is common. To ensure and enforce consistent service quality, fairness and protocol behavior it is necessary to measure and monitor these service level topologies. In this paper we present extensible general purpose mechanisms to monitor and measure characteristics of a service level topology at the nodes of the topology. The mechanisms provide means to dynamically deploy a distributed observation function at the nodes of the topology and to collate the observations into a result given to the requestor on a subscription channel. These are control plane mechanisms, outside of the router datapath, where we assume programmability and low cost memory. We give several examples of how to use these mechanisms to compute interesting properties of the topology.