A user perspective

This fact raises a number of problems:

• the size of a database containing network service characteristics grows rapidly;
• the characteristics hardly track a dynamic infrastructure (routes may change);
• each edge service becomes eligible as an active network monitoring node (which consumes local and network resources).

On the other hand, a network service that does not reflect an end-to-end path is of little help for the user that wants to know, for instance, how fast data will flow from a storage to a computing facility.

In order to bring this problem to a manageable size, we need to take into account a pecularity of a Grid:

groups of resident services are controlled by distinct administrations, which manage the infrastructure among local services and commit the communication infrastructure with the rest of the Grid to third parties.