REVOLUTIONIZING NETWORK PERFORMANCE TESTING WITH A NEXT-GEN TOOL

Computer Science And Engineering

This project explores in developing a network performance measurement tool that supports multiple clients concurrently. Computer networks have influenced the software industry by providing enormous resources distributed around the globe and interactions among people working anywhere in the world that the world today seems too small. Networks themselves have undergone a radical change in the last few decades starting from ARPANET to the Inter-Continental data cables that we see today. The amount of data that is carried on the Information Super Highway has been increasing everyday prompting for efficient management of the Trans-Continental Super Highway of data. The growing dependence on networks for everyday tasks has created the demand for high performance; reliable networks thereby making companies invest a lot on research on improving the networks and new designs. Part of achieving the goal of high performance is active monitoring of networks to help in the identification and prevention of network errors. Many tools have emerged to aid in performance monitoring of networks. The most common class of tools is based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), a protocol for sending and transmitting network performance information on IP networks. Other types of network performance monitoring tools include packet sniffers, flow monitors and application monitors. Examples of the various monitoring tools are SolarWind's Orion SNMP monitoring platform, WireShark packet capture tool, Webmetrics' GlobalWatch and Cisco's NetFlow flow monitoring tools.Finally , in a laboratory environment, the performance of four network traffic generators are compared. Two computers with Windows operating systems were connected via a 100 Mbps link and for various payload sizes, ranging from 128 Bytes to 1408 Bytes, the TCP traffic on the link was measured using the various monitoring tools mentioned above. The results indicate that these tools can produce significantly different results. In the Windows environment, the bandwidth that the tools measure can vary as much as 16.5 Mbps for a TCP connection over a 100 Mbps link..

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