In the November issue of IEEE Communications, ESnet’s Brian Tierney and Jason Zurawski served as co-editors (with four others) of a special section on network measurement and monitoring. According to the authors, writing in a guest editorial, even though more and more services (including the cloud) are increasingly important for both the scientific and corporate worlds, network performance has not kept up. And the network problems are becoming more subtle and detrimental, while also being more challenging to troubleshoot across domains. Addressing the problem requires both sophisticated measurement and monitoring tools that are interoperable and also meet policy requirements.

To examine novel approaches and standardization efforts, the team of guest editors solicited research papers and received 18 submissions, of which eight were selected for publication in two issues of IEEE Communications, with four appearing in the November 2013 issue and four in May 2014. In addition to Tierney and Zurawski, the editors were Prasad Calyam, University of Missouri—Columbia; Constantine Dovrolis, Georgia Tech; Loki Joergenson, Lionsgate Technologies; and Raj Kettimuthu, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago.

Access to the research papers is limited to IEEE members and subscribers.