Bandwidth Optimization Framework For Wide Area Network: The Case Of Addis Ababa University
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Date
2016-10-12
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Organizations Wide Area Networks are mostly designed to entertain the needs of several types of
users. In the case of academic institution networks, the wide area network is mainly required serve
the institutions users in order that it supports the main objective of the institution which is,
supporting the teaching and learning process, research process and giving community service
purposes. But because of the type of users that the wide area network of academic institutions
encompasses, the use of the network resources by the users is highly different from other types of
organizations. Academic institutions have a very special type of users, which are students that
utilize the network resource in a different way from other organizations. Students mostly abuse
network resources for different reasons like entertainment, experiment, to show their creativity by
causing cyber-attack on some services in the wide area network or outside. Such type of users
always tries to find a way of filling any available bandwidth and always use bandwidth. The act
of doing such activities causes unbalanced use of network resources within the network users. This
research aims to identify the cause of high bandwidth consumption by using log analysis tools with
the view of developing bandwidth optimization framework that will enable the network to provide
sustainable quality of service.
In order to achieve the objective of this study the researcher have used proxy log analysis by using
SAWMILL to identify the internet usage trend of the users. In addition to that measurement of
resource utilization at the core layers of different campuses of the institution has been done in order
to find a bottleneck factor at the core layer devices.
The result of the study showed as there is a great resource abuse by some group of users in the
network and as there is an unbalanced resource consumption among users of the network. The
research result has shown as more than half of the internet bandwidth is getting consumed by less
than 10 percent of the network users. To solve the issues mentioned WAN optimization framework
was developed by using quality of service building blocks.
In this research we did not incorporate network performance issues at the end devices.
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Keywords
Quality of Service, Performance Metrics, Network Traffic data, AAU WAN.