I am interested to explore the following issues.
First of all, from our customers' (ISPs) point of view, what benefits are to them to allow us to collect statistics of their traffic, and to share the data with other parties?
Subject to what is permitted legally, we are interested to collect as much information as possible to allow us to engineer the network to provide the highest quality of service to the customers. What would be most useful? We anticipate the increase in link speeds and emergence of new types of applications are likely to introduce a new level of problems in traffic management, and it is critical for us to understand the actual nature of the traffic. On the other hand, we need to cost-justify the collection instrument and process. In a practical way, it would be desirable if the community or industry can agree on a standard approach which we can include in our requirements to our network equipment vendors.
Since the Pacific Bell NAP is based on ATM technology, I am particularly interested in exploring what information can be collected in an ATM switch which would enable us to learn about traffic charactistics at the TCP/IP and application levels.