AQUILA Distributed QoS Measurement

The AQUILA project defines and implements a QoS architecture for dynamic end-to-end service provisioning in IP networks. This paper presents the distributed QoS measurement architecture (DMA) designed as a part of AQUILA. The scope of QoS measurement in AQUILA is the evaluation and validation of the AQUILA architecture and the support of the AQUILA resource control mechanisms. The measurement methodology in AQUILA comprises active and passive measurement. Active measurement is performed by synthetic application-like flows and by probing flows. While application-like flows are emulating real enduser applications, probing flows are thin measurement flows for monitoring the network behavior. Passive measurement in AQUILA relies on data gathered from different network elements. To implement the different measurement methods, three tools were developed: Measurement agents with application-like load generators for the measurement of end-to-end QoS of single and aggregated flow loads, measurement agents for active network probing to monitor the path performance characteristics and a router QoS monitor collecting management information from the routers for workload analyses. For the test scenarios and the measurement results, a measurement database was designed, which facilitates performance analysis and the correlation of the measurement results gathered from the different tools.