Identifier

etd-07062017-083312

Degree

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

This thesis provides a detailed analysis of the effects of TCP and UDP traffic over a LAN and WAN medium. In addition, it also analyses some real time applications like audio, video and web browsing that is affected by TCP traffic while sharing a bottleneck node and/or link resources. As network industry is growing continuously, the network administrator should be aware of TCP and UDP traffic that is traversing through their network. The analysis and monitoring of the traffic is crucial as it directly affects the performance of the network. Finding a cause for the poor performance of the network is quite important because it gives an idea to troubleshoot and resolve the issues effectively. In this thesis, we have created topologies using Cisco’s Virtual Internet Routing Lab (VIRL) [7]. They replicate an organizational infrastructure with client-server environment in LAN and WAN. Routing protocols such as OSPF and BGP are used to mimic the real world internet. A built-in LXC-iperf tool is used to generate the TCP and UDP traffic. During the generation of the traffic, various parameters are changed or controlled to see their effect on the network performance. As a learning and informative research, this thesis considers several Quality of Service (QoS) parameters that characterize the performance of an overall network. In particular, this thesis obtains packet loss, throughput, and jitter as QoS parameters when the resource has both TCP and UDP traffics simultaneously. We have examined, the effects on (i) TCP throughput and packet loss and (ii) UPD packet loss and jitter of (a) real time audio, (b) video, and (c) web browsing applications. These parameters examine how the traffic be manipulated to keep minimum packet loss, minimum jitter and maximum throughput. It is needless to say that all are competing with each other (TCP/UDP traffic) for sharing bottleneck resources. We have used a sample time of 15 seconds for each of our experimental results presented in this thesis. Our analysis shows that the best performance of the real time video and audio application is obtained when we select large size packet but its size being less than MTU of the link (without reducing the data rates). Similarly, in case of web browsing, we notice that throughput increases by increasing the window size and decreasing the latency. Efficient outcomes with the traffic analysis are achieved only if the experiments are carried out with adequate amount of attention. Overall, this work has provided us a great learning opportunity in the area of network performance using Cisco’s VIRL tool.

Date

2017

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Rai, Suresh

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.4510

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