Chapter 3. Metrics for Success

In order to determine if a space is an AGN, it has to be determined if the space adequately fulfills the minimum requirements. In order to do that performance standards for each component must be established, such that measurements can be taken and compared over time, among different sites. Each of the parts of the AGN have different standards by which to measure, this section tries to establish acceptable ranges for each measurement for each component of the space.

Some aspects of AGNs performance are difficult to measure. For these characteristics heuristics may be used to provide a measurement that is relative to the known possible best measurements. For example, multicast connectivity might be measured on the basis of the fraction of the time bi-directional connectivity is available to a core set of known-working sites; display interactivity might be measured by a combination of processor load and window event frequency. For the measurable aspects of the AGN we provide the following table outlining the standards to be considered an AGN.

Table 3-1. Minimum performance requirements for streaming data on the Access Grid.

Stream TypeMaximum LatencyMaximum JitterMinimum BandwidthMaximum LossMulticast
Text100 msN/A64Kb/s0%No
Audio[6,7]400 ms60ms 64Kb/s5%Yes
Video[8]400 ms30ms256Kb/s x 4 = 1 Mb/s25%Yes