The Dynamics of Network Topology

Abstract

Network monitoring is vital to ensure proper network operation over time, and is tightly integrated with all the data intensive processing tasks used by the LHC experiments. In order to build a coherent set of network management services it is very important to collect in near real-time information about the network topology, the main data flows, traffic volume and the quality of connectivity. A set of dedicated modules were developed in the MonALISA framework to periodically perform network measurements tests between all sites. We developed global services to present in near real-time the entire network topology used by a community. For any LHC experiment such a network topology includes several hundred of routers and tens of Autonomous Systems. Any changes in the global topology are recorded and this information is can be easily correlated with traffic patterns. The evolution in time of global network topology is shown a dedicated GUI. Changes in the global topology at this level occur quite frequently and even small modifications in the connectivity map may significantly affect the network performance. The global topology graphs are correlated with active end to end network performance measurements, done with the Fast Data Transfer application, between all sites. Access to both real-time and historical data, as provided by MonALISA, is also important for developing services able to predict the usage pattern, to aid in efficiently allocating resources globally.