A New Approach to Managing a Best Effort IP WAN Service

-The network standards organizations have left the assessment component of network management to the network administrator. While there are good reasons for doing so, we feel that this has unnecessarily left a void between network service management and the end user. Our research is motivated by this position. We present a network monitoring and assessment algorithm that bridges the gap that exists between readily available network performance statistics and the subsequent assessment which must decide if the network is meeting user and organizational requirements. We focus on the network planning activities surrounding an organization’s IP-based WAN (i.e., a best effort IP VPN or a private IP service). We propose a method that incorporates two fundamental concepts: first, the underlying performance metrics must be user oriented; second, the overall assessment of a WAN service is more meaningful if measured performance results drive an economic model that provides an estimate of the financial implications of network performance. While a contribution of this paper is to present our preliminary work on an ‘organizationally oriented’ method to manage an IP WAN service, the more important objective is to identify the issues surrounding the development and application of quality of experience assessment techniques to the network planning process. Keywords—network management, network provisioning, user oriented performance metrics