Low Overhead Continuous Monitoring of IP Network Performance

An Internet Service Provider or a corporate Intranet operator often needs to monitor the utilization and performance of its IP network. The performance metrics typically needed are the traffic, delay and loss-rate between two access-points. In many cases, the network provider needs to have the network operate within specific performance expectations, such as those specified within a Service Level Agreement (SLA) contract. A continuous measurement of the performance metrics is needed to ensure compliance with the SLA. However, traditional IP performance approaches typically include snap-shots of network performance at one single point, and do not offer much support for network performance between two customer access-points. The main difficulty associated with the measurement is that neither of the access-points ate the source or destination of an IP packet. In this paper, we present a scheme for network performance monitoring that can be used to monitor the IP performance problem between two access-points, and to verify that a specific SLA contract is being satisfied.