◆ Monitoring Infrastructure for Converged Networks and Services Shipra Agrawal, C. N. Kanthi, K. V. M. Naidu, Jeyashankher Ramamirtham, Rajeev Rastogi, Scott Satkin, and Anand Srinivasan Network convergence is enabling service providers to deploy a wide range of services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Internet Protocol television (IPTV), and push-to-talk on the same underlying IP networks. Each service has unique performance requirements from the network, and IP networks have not been designed to satisfy these diverse requirements easily. These requirements drive the need for a robust, scalable, and easy-to-use network management platform that enables service providers to monitor and manage their networks to provide the necessary quality, availability, and security. In this paper, we describe monitoring mechanisms that give service providers critical information on the performance of their networks at a per-user, per-service granularity in real time. This allows the service providers to ensure that their networks adequately satisfy the requirements of the various services. We present various methods to acquire data, which can be analyzed to determine the performance of the network. This platform enables service providers to offer carrier grade services over their converged networks, giving their customers a high-quality experience. © 2007 Alcatel-Lucent. VoIP places stringent requirements on the delay, loss, and jitter performance and requires high availability from the network (five nines availability); however, it has relatively low bandwidth requirements [20]. On the other hand, streaming applications are more tolerant of delay but generally require higher band- width from the network. These requirements drive the need for a robust, scalable, and easy-to-use net- work management platform, which enables service providers to monitor and manage their networks to provide the necessary quality, availability, and security. Introduction Service providers all over the world have started deploying services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol television (IPTV) on their IP-based networks to increase their revenues. Additionally, deploying new services over an IP net- work offers a reduction in their capital and opera- tional expenditure. Emerging paradigms such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) [5] allow service providers easily to deploy new services on their IP- based networks. A converged network demands a wide range of requirements from the underlying network depending on the services. For example, Bell Labs Technical Journal 12(2), 63–78 (2007) © 2007 Alcatel-Lucent. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). • DOI: 10.1002/bltj.20236