Enabling network measurement portability through a hierarchy of characteristics

Measurement and prediction of network resources are crucial so that adaptive applications can make use of grid environments. Although a large number of systems and tools have been developed to provide such measurement services, the diversity of grid resources and lack of central control prevent the development of a single monitoring system that can be deployed to answer every application's resource queries for connections between any pair of machines it can use. We propose a standard for representing network entities and measurements of their properties. Our standard enables the exchange of measurements and will allow applications to function even in environments without the particular measurement system for which they were developed. We present an overview of our measurement representation and evaluate its usefulness. We have used the characteristics hierarchy to store and exchange measurement data between several systems, and we discuss its usefulness in comparing the output of several measurement tools.