perfSONAR: Instantiating a Global Network Measurement Framework

Abstract. perfSONAR is a web services-based infrastructure for collecting and publishing network performance monitoring. A primary goal of perfSONAR is making it easier to solve end-to-end performance problems on paths crossing sev-eral networks. It contains a set of services delivering performance measurements in a federated environment. These services act as an intermediate layer, between the performance measurement tools and the diagnostic or visualization applica-tions. This layer is aimed at making and exchanging performance measurements across multiple networks and multiple user communities, using well-defined pro-tocols. This paper summarizes the key perfSONAR components, and describes how they are deployed by the US-LHC community to monitor the networks dis-tributing LHC data from CERN. All monitoring data described herein is publicly available, and we hope the availability of this data via a standard schema will inspire others to contribute to the effort by building network data analysis appli-cations that use perfSONAR.