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- Network Visualization: Today perfSONAR is more of a middleware architecture, it needs useful visualization tools to enable users to understand the network and rich information available from perfSONAR. This may involve mining for useful information, and or presenting the following areas in more accessible forms.
- Topology: With the growing push towards dynamically allocated circuits, it will become increasing more important to monitor and determine network topologies at multiple network layers in order to guarantee connectivity and performance for network users. Although users and networkers today have traceroute, one also needs more complex network topology tools to discover layer 1 and 2 paths, and to interrogate devices along the path.
- Performance Forecasting: As network applications demand more from the network, it will become important for applications (such as grid data replication) to determine when the best time to conduct transfers and or backups without affecting normal operations.
Wiki Markup Event Detection: Network administrators cannot review thousands of graphs each morning (e.g. multiple sites, interfaces, metrics, paths etc.) looking for anomalies/events. They need automated detection and alerting of significant, persistent changes. Today the network adminsitrators mainly detect whether a link is up or not. As network performance increases and one approaches high reliability this will need to change to not just on/off but to more subtle performance changes. As we have shown elsewhere \[5\] changes in IP routes, though important, often occur without impact on the performance of a path, and many serious performance changes occur without route changes.
- Network Diagnostics: Having found a network event, our experience has shown that are many steps that must be conducted by seasoned professionals and network engineers to determine the cause of the event. Many of these can, and should be automated to gather immediate results such that tentative conclusions can be used to simplifying the task of network diagnostics further.
- Application Integration: by representing the network as a service by which users and applications can interact, it is hoped that applications will be able to more use of network resources and improve application performance and experience. Examples include large scale replication efforts being steared steered by Performance Forecasting, and automatically diagnostics of network connectivity and performance problems.
In addition we wish to deploy the perfSONAR and related tools on the Pakistan Educational and Research Network (PERN). We feel that this is important in order to This will add another country's NREN to the worldwide set of NRENs able to be monitored and communicate via perfSONAR. It will also provide a means by which the network operator can is not only be held accountable for the performance of their network, but also provide mechanisms by which their network engineers can better utilize their efforts.
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