Generation NeXT Comes to College.

It is clear that measurement and monitoring will be a key element in the management of future network infrastructures, both at the level of network equipment and also in the overall distributed control of the large scale Internet infrastructure. In the future, interoperability of monitoring and data collection capabilities can provide the support basis of seamless end-to-end network and service composition and operation across multiple operators and business domains. During the last five years important research initiatives emerged worldwide to tackle problems of Internet monitoring and data collection. In FP6 the EU ICT programme started several successful Internet measurement and monitoring efforts to boost European leadership within this emerging area. These projects already passed the proof of the concept stage and now key applications in future network management can be developed on their basis.
This project is aimed at integrating existing measurement and monitoring infrastructures towards a common and open pan European platform. This will be achieved through harmonisation of individual components, definition of common data format, development of unified interface, to provide the flexibility to the design of future Internet applications. On the other hand, the project will allow semantic representation and retrieval of measurement and monitoring information. Additionally the project will develop and demonstrate a set of tools and applications for next generation networks taking advantage from the integrated approach


Internet researchers face many daunting challenges, including keeping up with the conditions of ever changing operational environments, privacy concerns, legal complications, and resource access. One of the most fundamental problems remains access to current operational data on Internet infrastructure. For many projects the relevant datasets simply do not exist, and researchers must go through a laborious process of securing permission and deploying measurement infrastructure before they can begin to study a problem. For others, the necessary data may exist and even be available. Unfortunately, if word-of-mouth has insufficiently propagated the information about the data ownership and access procedures, researchers may waste time and effort creating a new dataset, use a dataset inappropriate for a given research problem, or possibly even abandon the research.
In addition, the dearth of centralized knowledge about the few datasets that are known to exist in the community leads researchers to use these datasets well past their window of representativeness. Correspondingly, lack of awareness of datasets limits longitudinal study of network conditions, since comparable datasets that span months or years are difficult to find. While the resource, legal, and privacy concerns limiting new Internet data collection efforts remain largely intractable, significant research could be promoted through more widespread use of existing data.