Six companies led by Cisco Systems Inc have developed a draft specification designed to enable remote monitoring and analysis RMON tool offerings to be developed for the management of Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks. The specification will be presented to the Internet Engineering Task Force for consideration as a standard this month and was developed to try to answer the complex management requirements of connection- oriented Asynchronous Mode networks. According to Cisco, the original RMON standard, and RMON2, were used as the basis for the specification, which also identifies different methods that can be used to collect the information, including the circuit- steering proposal developed by the ATM Monitoring Consortium and the option to have cell-level RMON instrumentation integrated into an Asynchronous Mode switch fabric. The Asynchronous Mode RMON draft specification also defines how Asynchronous Mode traffic should be assessed including basic cell statistics per port, per virtual connection, per host and per conversation pair – and data reduction methods to enable the capture of frames rather than random cells. The other participants in the development are Axon Networks Inc, Frontier Software Development Inc, Net2Net Corp, Network General Corp, Netsys Technologies Inc and Radcom Equipment Inc.
