- Bahasa: Inggris
- Jumlah Halaman: 112
- Format file: PDF
- Publisher: University of Central England in Birmingham, IlmuKomputer.Com
- Tahun terbit: Januari 2000
- Download thesis lengkap (PDF): sufehmi-thesis-ncp.zip
Network
Capacity Planning is an aspect of a networked computer system that many
IT manager/Network manager forgot to do. Especially for IT managers in a
growing company, there are many cases where they got the shocking
surprise when their current network infrastructure (seems) suddenly just
overwhelmed by the load imposed by its users.
In a WAN (Wide Area Network) environment
especially, if a network application will be deployed, it is advised
that the company first assess its possible impact on the WAN resources.
Because most WAN links has only small bandwidth, even an application
that runs fine in a 10 Mbps is still possible to bog down the WAN links
when deployed without tested first, making it unusable.
NUS (Network Utility Suite) is a software suite
which contains 3 modules, based on client/server architecture. It
contains Network Benchmarking, Network Monitoring, and Network
Application Simulator modules. This dissertation concerns itself only
with the last module, Network Application Simulator, in relation to the
interest to network capacity planning.
Each of these modules are done by different
people, and presented as a separate project. In the end however, it is
intended to merge all of those modules to form a single software suite,
called NUS.
NUS's Network Application Simulator is designed
to be able to perform robust simulation on the real network itself, if
desired, outside office hours for example. It will also be able to
perform it in an isolated environment, in a Testlab for example. The
following lists its features:
- Ability to perform simulation on the real network, by simulating the specific application tasks over network between the server and client.
- Ability to test the whole subnet of the WAN (more realistic result, but must be done off-hours to avoid impact to working users), or do the test just in an isolated network environment (less realistic, but can be done anytime) between as little as 2 computers.
- Produce statistical report to the user
- Easy-to-use user interface
The ability to simulate an application on the network
could be realised with the aid of a spesialised scripting language
(NetSim) that will simulate the behaviour of that particular
application. So basically we will have a mini interpreter in this
software to interpret the script, translate it into a form
understandable by the computer, and run it. Before we can create the
script, we need to capture the application's traffic first by using any
packet capture software; such as LANalyzer, Microsoft's SMS, or some
other tools available in UNIX. Then based on the captured information,
we can create the script.
The script is very flexible and can be tailored
to simulate practically any network traffic scenario. The options menu
will provide only basic configurability, for maximum configurability the
user will need to tune the script. But since the structure and the
syntax of the scripting language is very simple, it should not be a
problem.
The application also has a reporting feature. It
will report the bandwidth requirement for the duration of the
simulation, and will also provide a graphic chart of the simulation
process. Therefore user can further analyse the network traffic in much
detail, since the graphic chart is quite versatile - we can move/zoom
in/zoom out/print the chart easily.
The simulation software produced from this
project will be rather basic. One can say that it's a proof-of-concept
software; demonstrating the validity of the student's hypothesis on
network simulation, although still providing basic functionality. But,
inside it already has the foundation for further enhancements, so it
will be easy to extend the software or to add more features to it.
The student shall continue to maintain this project.
In the event of his inability to continue maintaining the project, the
student intend to release the full source code to a trusted third-party
or put it on the Internet, whichever in his judgement will provide the
best benefit to the community; so to enable further development of the
software. MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher software) is one prove of
many that by providing your source code to the community, you'll
accelerate its development (see
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html#HIST).
All software released from this project will be
available for free for use by educational and government institutions.
And in addition to it, full source code will be made available to
educational institutions on request, to encourage further development
and study of this topic. Distribution of the software will be done by
utilising the Internet.
