Bandwidth Management Using Ip Traffic Analysis: a Case Study of the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.
CHAPTER ONE
PREAMBLE
Towards the end of year 2005, the Ahmadu Bello University (henceforth referred to as the University) management entered into a bandwidth consortium agreement under the auspices of the Africa Virtual University (AVU) with five other universities in Nigeria ; such as Obafemi Awolowo University ( OAU) Ife, University of Jos, University of P ortharcourt, Bayero University Kano (BUK) and University of Ibadan ( UI) to acquire a 6.5mbps of bandwidth to improve on the 512kbps it had before the formation of the consortium . For more than 18 months after that, the bandwidth consumption of the University communi ty was less than 25% of the purchased capacity. However in the past 12 months, a pattern of traffic congestion was noted on the University network especially during work hours (10am-3:30pm) even though less than 50% of the University community have access to the internet and it was found that during th e periods of congestion, the University traffic i s between 99% and 103%(due to burst capacity) of her purchased capacity (3). This work is an attempt to solve the traffic congestion by devising a bandwidth man agement strategy based on the analysis of the IP traffic on the network.
CHAPTER TWO
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
History of the Internet
The conceptual foundation for creation of the i nternet was significantly developed by three individuals and a research conference, each of which changed the way we thought about technology by accurately predicting its future:
- Vannevar Bush wrote the first visionary description of the potential uses for informationtechnology with his description of the “memex” automated library system .
- NorbertWiener invented the field of Cybernetics, inspiring future researchers to focus on the use of technology to extend human capabilities.
- The1956 Dartmouth Arti ficial Intelligence conference crystallized the concept that technology was improving at an exponential rate, and provided the first serious consideration of the consequences.
- MarshallMcLuhan made the idea of a global village interconnected by an ele ctronic nervous system part of our popular culture.
The first networking protocol used on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the Network Control Program . In 1983, it was replaced with the TCP/ IP protocol developed by Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf , and others, which quickly became the most widely used network protocol in the world, the use of the Internet exploded after 1990, causing the US Government to transfer management to independent organizations starting in 1995
The Internet workings include a technical design and a management structure. The management structure consists of a generally democratic collection of loosely -coupled organizations and working groups with mostly non -overlapping responsibilities. The technical design is founded on a complex, interlocking set of hierarchical tree -like structures like Internet Protocol addresses and domain names, mixed with networked structures like packet switching and routing protocols, all tied together with millions of lines of sophisticated software that continues to get better all the time.
So far this combination of management and technical structures has worked well, providing the reliable, powerful communication platform on which the rest of the complexity of the Internet is b uilt [22]
What is an Internetwork ?
An internetwork is a collection of individual networks as in Figure 2.1, connected by intermediate networking devices, that functions as a single large network. Internetworking refers to the industry, products, and pr ocedures that meet the challenge of creating and administering internetworks.
CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY
Proposed Model
CHAPTER FOUR
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Sample of Results and Data collected.
The monitoring system was initially installed on a small office network in order to test run it before installing it on the University network. The sample results are shown in Figures
CHAPTER FIVE
RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION
Introduction
The installation, configuration and analysis of IP traffic on the U niversity network is very crucial to help in making informed decisions and proper management of the university network, such that the expensive and limited bandwidth can be used maximally for the majorly academic purposes.
Limitations
Due to cost of software license and durability, open source software was chosen to carry out this research, this H owever, it requires a lot of understanding and support to be able to install and configure the monitoring server
The Software (ntop) could not store data for a long period and most often data is reset whenever the system shuts down. This requires that data be taken and stored elsewhere on daily basis.
The server was configured on a university live network , this limits the period of time the experimental configuration of DoS could be allowed on the network.
Conclusion
To be able to achieve the desired goal of paying a large sum of money for bandwidth by the university management which is mainly for academic and research purposes some measures need to be put in place to check unwanted traffic on the network. It should
however be noted that while such denials are put in place some (though very few) activities may also be affected but can always be resolved when they are noticed.
Some sites that are not of high priority for academic activities are recommended to be allowed on the university network between 5pm and 9am. Access to such sites like yahoo, Microsoft, Avast, grisoft should be denied during the hours of 9am and 4pm.
The university mail should be the official e -mail for all university community members. This will reduce the use of free mail boxes like yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc.
Software download should be denied on the university site except on special request, alternative arr angement can be made to have an ftp server where regularly downloaded software can be kept for download on the university network.
A Microsoft update server may be installed on the university network where all Microsoft update traffic will be redirected fo r updates.
The university management may also need to adopt a good and light weight antivirus to be used on the university network; this will allow the university to make an arrangement for a network update of such antivirus.
Suggestion for Further Wo rk
It is suggested that a further research may be ca rried out on how to compress ntop data automatically so that the data can be stored for a long period.
This will further help to make informed decision when trying to put in place measures to manage a campus network and reduce congestion.
References
- “BandwidthManagement” http:// wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Bandwidth_management
- Greaves,(2008), “Making Strategic Decisions about Bandwidth”, e/ Merger 2008 South Africa
- “Info Vista(April 2008) Intelsat monitoring system Itsdvb.fus.idr.14 inbound2008
- “ntop Man page”http://www.ntop.org
- “History of theInternet”http://www.walthowe.com/ na vnet/history.html
- Hunt, (2002), TCP/ IP Network Administration, 3. ed, O’Reilly Inc
- Ziwicky,D (2000), Building Internet Firewalls, 2 . ed O’Reilly Inc 2000
- E.Mohamed, H. Abdel-Wahab, I. Salama, “Multicast address management in the
- Internet: a st udy of the port blocking problem,” aiccsa, pp. 74-I, ACS/IEEE 2005
- “NtopNetwork Monitoring Guide” Mukom Akong Tamon http://Techowto.wordpress.co,
- Luca D et.al(2000) “ Improving Network Security using Ntop”, RAID 2000 Toulouse, France
- Report created on Mon Jul 7 12:07:562008[ntop uptime:3:07:21] Generated by ntop v.3.2 [i686-pc-linux-gnu]Report created on Tue Aug 26 13:06:06 2008 [ntopuptime: 21:05:16] Generated by ntop 3.3.7 [i686 -pc-linux-gnu]
