The mPlane project, an Intelligent Measurement Plane for Future Network and Application Management, consists of a “Distributed Measurement Infrastructure” being able to perform active, passive, and hybrid measurements. mPlane does operate at a wide variety of scales and dynamically supports new functionality. The so-called Repository and Analysis layer collects, stores, and analyzes data collected via parallel processing and data mining approaches The Intelligent Reasoner drills down into the cause of an evidence collected, determining those conditions, which may lead to the cause and it supports the understanding of problem origins.

The outcome of the mPlane Workshop for SmartenIT is considered relevant, though, not in SmartenIT’s core areas of work, since the problems of measurement data, its interpretation, and its use within SmartenIT would go beyond the mPlane architecture, consisting out of its client and component. The discussion at the workshop revealed, however, that privacy of data collected, general problems of making network data “useful” besides for topology and performance, and a certain delta between a “nice” architecture and many of its custom-made implementation instances remain as open issues. In a second aspect, such measurements and its clients performing those could potentially be of use for indicating SmartenIT’s relevant parameter values, especially in need for DTM and RBH. However, such as theoretically motivated approach was already performed in a practical and straight-forward manner within SmartenIT, without utilizing the slightly heavy-weighted mPlane protocol as such.

Discussions and questions during this event revealed that privacy, data protection, and regulatory aspects had been debated, but they have not been fully integrated into the project’s current outcome, as it is focused mainly on the prototyping and evaluation of the technology developed at this stage.