These data are to be collected through both active and passive network monitoring. Support is requested to assist QBone networks with meeting their measurement requirements and to develop infrastructure, tools, and APIs for disseminating, analyzing, and visualizing these measurement data. Although we see careful instrumentation of the network as necessary to understanding application performance, it is not sufficient. It is essential that applications themselves be instrumented and that application-specific performance metrics be developed. These discussions will take place in the workshops on applications performance that are described below.
Networks negotiate their relationships based on the business policy in service level agreements.
This legal policy is translated to policies governing the capabilities of the network. In addition to public policy, the network needs private policy to govern the internal functioning and access to scarce resources. DiffServ bandwidth negotiations is the development of policy languages to aid the administration of public and private policy. Tools have been created by ISI and Merit, to translate the policy language to router configuration, the IETF has recently formed a Policy Framework working group that is developing a framework for managing and sharing policy information. Policy frameworks and specification languages will aid the storage and use of public and private policy for the QBone.