Probes coordination protocol for network performance measurement in grid computing environment. to appear

Abstract. The fast expansion of Grid technologies emphasizes the importance of network performance measurement. Some network measurement methods, like TCP throughput or latency evaluation, are very sensitive to concurrent measurements that may devalue the results. This paper presents the Probes Coordination Protocol (PCP) which can be used to schedule different network monitoring tasks. In addition, this paper goes on to discuss the main properties of the protocol; these being, flexibility, efficiency, robustness, scalability and security. This study presents the results of its evaluation and of experiment periodicity measurements. Introduction. The purpose of Computational Grids is to aggregate large collections of shared resources (computing, communication, storage, information) in order to build an effective and high performance computing environment for data-intensive or computing-intensive applications. The underlying communication infrastructure of these large scale distributed environments consists of a complex interconnection of the public Internet, local area networks and high performance system area networks like Myrinet. Consequently “th