Conclusions

The task of reporting characteristics of the communication infrastructure for match-making purposes exhibits contradictory requirements:

• on user's side, only service-to-service observations are of use;
• on GMA's side, the collection of service-to-service observations is not scalable

A compromise is mandatory, that must satisfy a further restriction: the synthesis of a path characteristic based on sub-path characteristics is unreliable.

We devise a possible compromise, by grouping services in domains: compromise means that none of the parties will obtain an ideal service...

Issues on user's side,

• a matchmaking will entail one further database query in order to map services to domains (or viceversa);
• reported characteristics are less reliable than those collected service-to-service.

• communication infrastructure is bound to comply with the basic inside/outside requirement;
• a new component (namely the database) must be introduced, which cannot be assimilated to a simple directory.