Network Performance Engineering

Network Performance Engineering

Over recent years a great deal of progress has been made in the performance
modelling and evaluation of the Internet, towards the convergence of multiser-vice heterogeneous networks, supported by internetworking and the evolution
of diverse access and switching technologies. Performance modelling, evalua-tion and prediction of such networks are of crucial importance in view of their
ever-expanding usage and the multiplicity of their component parts and the
complexity of their functioning.
However, many important and challenging performance-engineering issues
need to be addressed and resolved, such as those involving heterogeneous network
architectures and technology integration, traffic modelling and characterization,
management, congestion control, routing and quality-of-service (QoS). The ulti-mate goal is the establishment of a global and wide-scale integrated broadband
network infrastructure for the efficient support of multimedia applications with
different QoS guarantees. Of particular interest and challenge is the design and
engineering of the next- and future-generation Internets, such as those based on
the convergence of heterogeneous wireless networks enabled by internetworking
and wireless mesh networking technologies. Moreover, of vital interest is the cre-ation of generic evaluation platforms capable of measuring and validating the
performance of networks of diverse technology and multi-service interoperability.
In this context, robust quantitative methodologies and performance modelling
tools are needed, such as those based on queueing network models (QNMs), in
order to provide a sound theoretical underpinning of application-driven research
leading to credible and cost-effective algorithms for the performance evaluation
and prediction of convergent heterogeneous networks under various traffic han-dling protocols.

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