A measurement based architecture for adaptive network environments

The Internet constitutes a heterogeneous mesh of networks with highly varying characteristics. One of the features of this environment is that there normally are a number of possible paths for data to travel between two end-hosts. These different paths exhibit highly different properties in terms of bandwidth, delay, reliability etc. One of the challenges in this environment is to map the properties of a path to application specific requirements. To this end, the concept of adaptive network architectures has been introduced. These architectures can perform the mapping of path characteristics to application requirements but one of the remaining problems with these architectures is how to discover the available paths and their properties. We present a novel architecture that overcomes this problem. The architecture consists of two parts, a hybrid network-monitoring tool and a path discovery algorithm.