[IRTF-Announce] NMRG Report

[Aaron Falk <falk at ISI.EDU>]

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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