Project ID:
RFP-2006-009
Title:
Application Flow Management and Service Assurance
Summary:
Note: This RFP was revised Jul-25-2007, to clarify research goals, and reduce IPR restrictions.
There are few tools that relate end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) to measurable network behavior. Historically, keeping per-flow information that might help connect individual resource consumption with QoE has been prohibitively expensive. However, new measurement techniques may help the situation. The question is, can we develop data management, correlation and performance management techniques that allow us to infer and manage end-user QoE from per flow and individual resource measurements?
For this RFP, we are interested specifically in network management and instrumentation proposals.
Full Description:
As Service Providers push to provide a larger share of the user experience (become Experience Providers) and Enterprise IT needs to rapidly deliver new business applications to distributed organizations, meeting SLA requirements increasingly depends on understanding whether network behavior is meeting end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) goals. This drives the need to detect, monitor and control individual application flows as they traverse the network. Technical enablers that have become available include: flexible netflow, deep packet inspection, control-plane path construction and monitoring, and active and passive measurement.
A comprehensive application flow management and service assurance system might infer (and improve) end-user QoE by collecting and correlating information from: Network monitoring agents that collect low-level resource and basic service data; Application-flow monitoring agents; and End-system QoE monitoring agents. Among the challenges are the need to correlate application flows with network resource performance (including monitoring service path data over time), identifying the application flows contributing to a given customer experience (in a wide range of contexts, including mobility and inter-application dependencies), and dealing effectively with the explosion of performance data from different sources and of widely varying granularities.
We specifically invite network management and instrumentation proposals that result in meaningful improvement in end-user Quality of Experience and operations simplicity/effectiveness. Proposals should define or implement candidate QoE monitoring and correlation systems, or components or technologies within such systems, or should explore whether such systems are feasible, scalable and effective.
Constraints and other information:
Cisco will grant ownership of all new intellectual property ("new IP") developed in this project to the successful proposer/university, and in return expects a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, transferable license to the new IP.
Proposal submission:
Please use the link below to submit a proposal for research responding to this RFP. After a preliminary review, we may ask you to revise and resubmit your proposal.
Create/submit a proposal for this RFP
RFPs may be withdrawn as research proposals are funded, or interest in the specific topic is satisfied. Researchers should plan to submit their proposals as soon as possible. Submissions-to-date are reviewed at the beginning of each quarter (the first business day of: January, April, July, October).
Questions? Contact: research@cisco.com
