Scalability of an end-to-end architecture

When applied to network monitoring, the above architectures overlook a problem, which becomes evident when Grid size scales up: the number of network resources, intended as paths interconnecting edge resources, grows with the square of Grid size.

The case of resources that are bound to a node is quite different from the case of resources that represent communication between nodes: the former grow with the number of nodes, the latter with its square.

As a consequence, representing communication resources using end-to-end characteristics may limit the scalability of a monitoring architecture.

In addition, availability of end-to-end measurements implies that:

• nodes that host Grid resources also support network monitoring protocols and
• each pair of nodes hosting Grid resources should generate network monitoring traffic, with an increment of network load that is a square of the nodes.