[IRTF-Announce] NMRG Report

[Aaron Falk <[e-mail]>]

Network Management Research Group Report
August 2005:

[1] The NMRG held its 18th meeting in Nancy on July 30/31. The meeting
    focused on VoIP management. The details can be found at:

    <http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nmrg/meetings/2005/nancy/>

    During the meeting, topics such as measurements and metrics, fault
    isolation and reporting mechanisms, provisioning, data modeling,
    speech quality, and security aspects were discussed in the context
    of VoIP applications. Several observations were made:

    (1) VoIP management requirements largely depend on the underlying
        VoIP business model. There seems to be a continuum of business
        models ranging from classic centralized managed voice services
        to fully distributed P2P voice services where management
        aspects are handled within a distributed P2P infrastructure.
        It might be useful to document the management requirements for
        typical VoIP business models.

    (2) There are several ongoing activities to define VoIP metrics
        and mechanisms to obtain / access / distribute / aggregate
        measurements.  There seems to be a need for a document which
        explains how the various activities fit together and
        complement each other. There also seems to be a need for
        additional research on aggregation mechanisms tailored to VoIP
        metrics.

    (3) For VoIP calls, especially those which cross network domain
        boundaries, it seem to be useful to explore how VoIP endpoints
        and intermediaries can take an active role in fault isolation
        and diagnostics by providing detailed fault reports that
        include information gathered from other nodes in the network.
        This requires the definition and execution of suitable
        diagnostic procedures, potentially executed on nodes in
        different parts of the Internet.

    (4) On a longer perspective, there is interest in more fundamental
        research to replace the classic manager-agent management model
        with a more distributed P2P style management model where nodes
        in the network cooperate to identify and solve problems and to
        exchange management information. Another way to describe this
        would be a self-organizing management overlay. This approach
        seems especially interesting for managing applications
        crossing domain boundaries and which themselves organize in a
        P2P fashion (some VoIP solutions being an example for this).

[2] Several NMRG participants continue joined work on SNMP traffic
    measurements and analysis with the goal to develop models
    describing how SNMP is being used in production networks.



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