Monitoring and troubleshooting multi-domain networks using measurement federations [Guest Editorial]

In both the scientific and corporate worlds, users, resources, and data are often physically distributed, making networks increasingly important for all operations. Enormous progress has been made in increasing the capacity and accessibility of networking infrastructures, which in turn has fostered wider adoption of cloud and grid environments. Unfortunately, these advances have not directly translated into improved performance for all applications and users; instead, network performance problems become even more subtle and detrimental as the capacity of the network increases, and troubleshooting them on multidomain network paths is highly challenging. These problems may be as benign as congestion from other network users, or as serious as packet loss caused by one or more intermediate domain infrastructure(s) and architectural flaws.