Tien Van Do, Ph.D, Department of
Telecommunications, BUTE
Zsolt Pándi, Department of Telecommunications,
BUTE
{do,pandi}@hit.bme.hu
Presently there are
a growing number of real-time applications (VoIP, streaming audio and video) on
the Internet, which is due to the economic reason that the Internet is a cheap
medium to realise these applications. The provision of real-time applications
in the Internet is not straightforward because the presently applied service
model is Best Effort. Therefore, the QoS (quality of service) of real-time
applications is not guaranteed. Since real-time applications often use UDP as a
transport layer protocol, their generated traffic is not friendly with other
traffic types.
In order to provide appropriate QoS, new solutions are needed. On the
one hand, an appropriate technology (QoS architecture) should be chosen. On the
other hand, network operators should provide traffic engineering solutions for
the deployed network. One very important task, which determines the success of
traffic engineering, is the performance measurement of applications and
networks. Measurement procedures can be categorised as follows:
1.
Active
measurement: a traffic generator injects artificial traffic into the network in
the direction of a receiver. Data is collected both at the generator and at the
receiver.
2.
Polling: ask
network devices about statistical parameters by the use of SNMP.
3.
Passive
measurement, where special hardware and software tool is needed to passively
capture traffic.
Generally passive measurement is the most accurate method compared to
the other ones. The hardware used for capturing network traffic is called a
protocol analyser. As protocol analysers are basically applied for finding
errors, their statistical services supplied by vendors are rather poor and,
after all, not adequate for supporting the service planning and provision of IP
networks.
Our project aims at the development of a distributed measurement
methodology and enhancement of services of the commercial protocol analyser
family by RADCOM Inc.
The scientific aims of the project are defined as follows:
1.
Development of a multi-point
measurement method to measure the performance parameters of VoIP and real-time
applications.
2.
Proposal of a
traffic engineering method in order to provide good quality of service for VoIP
and real-time applications.
Those aims will be embedded in the development of a software package
aiming at both national and international commercial markets.