Monitoring the Quality of Transparent LAN Services

Monitoring the Quality of Transparent LAN Services is not enough at the aggregate level; it is also necessary at the flow level. Different TLS flows carry different Quality of Service requirements. Therefore, if you want to monitor the Quality of Transparent LAN Services, you must also check the interfaces at layer 2 level. You can use this information to estimate the Quality of Transparent LAN Services and determine whether the requirements have been met.

The best way to configure the service is to choose between point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint configurations. Traditionally, businesses with multiple locations used to buy dedicated facilities to link their LANs. These facilities were costly and slow compared to corporate LANs, and they required the expertise of IT personnel. Moreover, the LANs were spread out over multiple locations, making them difficult to manage. However, with Transparent LAN Service, you can easily connect two remote sites.

The Transparent LAN Service is defined by Service Level Agreements. These contracts between the service provider and its customers define the Quality of Service in statistical and quantitative terms. The SLAs typically describe throughput, packet loss, and jitter, as well as the relative priority of network access. The SLAs enable the service provider to offer different kinds of Quality of Service, depending on the needs of the customer. In this case, the Transparent LAN Service is not available with an ad-hoc connection.

Transparent LAN Service enables corporate LANs to connect with each other at native speeds. This service uses the service provider’s ATM backbone as the backbone. The technology is known as TLS and it is “transparent” because the end users are not required to know the carrier’s delivery methods and infrastructure to connect different sites. Instead, they simply hand the service provider a LAN segment from each site, which the provider then interconnects.