Abstract
In end-to-end monitoring, traffic measurements are recorded at the source and destination nodes. In QoS distribution monitoring, the measurements are recorded at several intermediate nodes along a connection. End-to-end monitoring is conceptually simple and easy to implement, but not capable of localizing the degradation. Thus, any corrective action has to be applied end-to-end, which can be prohibitively expensive. Although QoS distribution monitoring holds the promise of being able to localize the degradation to a single domain, prevalent QoS distribution monitoring techniques do not consistently provide this capability. They also consume excessive resources in the monitoring process and rely on assumptions which are unlikely to hold in practice. In this paper we describe the design tradeoffs associated with QoS distribution monitoring and highlight the limitations of the existing research. We then describe a QoS distribution monitoring scheme which provides practical solutions to these challenges. Using extensive analysis we compare the efficiency of the proposed scheme to the prevalent ones.