Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the quick growth of the World Wide Web
(WWW) traffic raises the question of whether past Local Area Network (LAN) packet
traces still reflect the current situation or whether they have become obsolete. For this
thesis, several LAN packet traces were obtained by monitoring the LAN of a typical academic
environment. The tools for monitoring the network were a stand-alone HP LAN
Protocol Analyzer as well as the free-ware software tool tcpdump. The main focus was
placed on acquiring a low-level overview of the LAN traffic. Thus, it was possible to
determine what protocols were mainly used and how the packet sizes were distributed.
In particular, this study aimed at establishing the amount of WWW traffic on the LAN,
and determining the MIME-Types of this traffic. The results indicate that in a typical
academic environment, conventional sources of LAN traffic such as NFS are still predominant,
whereas WWW traffic plays a rather marginal role. Furthermore, a large portion
of the network packets contains little or no data at all, while another significant portion
of the packets have sizes around the Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU). Consequently,
research in the networking field has to direct its focus on issues beside the
WWW. / Graduation date: 1998
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33850 |
| Date | 01 May 1998 |
| Creators | Schmid, Andreas |
| Contributors | Lee, Ben |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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