All, At the end of last year, TERENA announced the establishment of a new Task Force for European Traffic Metrics (TF-ETM). The first meeting was due to be held in January, but due to various circumstances, unfortunately had to be cancelled. TERENA appreciates there is a great deal of interest in this subject and would like to re-schedule this meeting for Thursday, 24th April 1997 at the TERENA offices in Amsterdam . Kevin Hoadley of UKERNA has kindly agreed to lead the new task force, which will also be assisted by Kevin Meynell, a TERENA Project Development Officer. Networking professionals from academic, governmental or commercial sectors are all welcome to attend TF-ETM. Attached below are the proposed activities of TF-ETM. There is also a mailing list that can be joined by sending mail to mailserver@terena.nl containing only the text subscribe tf-etm <your real name>. A Web Page will be available shortly. If you would like to attend this meeting, or wish to obtain some more information, please e-mail Kevin Meynell (meynell@terena.nl). Apologies to anyone who receives multiple copies of this message. Regards, Kevin Meynell ----- In order to address the problem of predicting the growth of network traffic and its consequences for performance, many network operators already collect basic statistics on their own network's performance and traffic flows. However there is no data available for national-level comparisons with other networks' performance. The objective of the proposed project is to collect and analyze data which will enable technicans to focus on the causes of decreased performance, and propose corrective actions. The activities will include the development of a mechanism and structure for collecting statistics of traffic loads on an end to-end international level, measurements of delays, flow capacity and packet loss information. The vacuum created in national-level statistics/metrics collection has significantly complicated planning by TERENA members and service providers. While detailed traffic and performance measurements are essential to identifying the causes of network problems and formulating corrective actions, it is trend analysis and accurate network/system monitoring which permits network managers to identify 'hot spots', predict problems before they occur, and identify ways to avoid them by efficient deployment of resources and optimising of network configuration. As the explosive growth and dependence on the information infrastructure continues, it is critical that mechanisms be established to enable infrastructure planning and analysis. It is proposed to address these problems on two levels of relevance: significance to analysis of network performance, and relevance to Internet settlements. The activities will then include cross-European measurements of total traffic through specified links and the mapping of reachable destinations covered by a route, delay measurements, flow capacity, continental averages of hops, and rate of packet loss monitoring. These measurements will be conducted using publicly available software packages.