A Distributed Non-intrusive Real-time Network Effectiveness Measurement System

The future military network is envisioned to be a system of systems consisting of heterogeneous groups/domains operating at different networking paradigms using different waveforms/interfaces. Existing research has been focused mostly on the enabling technologies such as radios, media access, network protocols, scheduling, etc., however, a grand challenge has emerged: how do we effectively measure the network performance, and identify the potential protocol/configuration/policy issues, in order to assure that networks will function effectively in dynamic and possibly bandwidth-constrained military environments? To address this critical need, we propose to develop a distributed Non-intrusive Real-time network effectiveness Measurement (NORM) system, which monitors, collects, transfers and analyzes network effectiveness without impact the network being measured. Our goal is to implement an effective non-intrusive real-time monitoring system by integrating hardware platform and software components.