cassel@DEWEY.UDEL.EDU (Boots Cassel) (01/16/86)
University of Delaware Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Technical Report 86-12
Local Area Broadcast Network Measurement: Traffic Characterization
by Paul D. Amer
Ram N. Kumar
Rueybin Kao
Jeffrey T. Phillips
Lillian N. Cassel
Abstract
Eight weeks of traffic were monitored on an Ethernet with five
major hosts and interconnections to another LAN and the ARPAnet. Over
104.7 million packets consisting of 10+ billion octets were observed.
This paper characterizes the monitored traffic and concludes for our
LAN that the overall arrival of packets on the Ethernet is not Poisson
as often assumed in analytic studies, the bit error rate is low with
periodic bursts caused by faulty hardware and software, the network
load is, as expected, bursty in nature, the packet size distribution
is not bimodal (as observed in other studies), most of the traffic is
generated by network servers (terminal switches), and less than 10% of
the traffic travels outside the local network.
Key words and phrases: broadcast network, CSMA/CD, Ethernet, local
area network, measurement center, performance evaluation, traffic
characterization, workload characterization.
The technical report is now available. Anyone who would like a copy of
the tech report should send name and address to
Boots Cassel
cassel@dewey.udel.EDU
or
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716