Characterizing Traffic Behavior

Rab Nawaz Jadoon

Department of Computer Science Assistant Professor
COMSATS IIT, Abbottabad
DCS Pakistan
COMSATS Institute of
Information Technology

Telecommunication Network Design (TND)

 Characterizing Traffic behaviour
 To select appropriate network design solutions,
you need to understand protocol and
application behavior in addition to traffic flows
and load.
 For example, to select appropriate LAN topologies,
you need to investigate the level of broadcast traffic
on the LANs.
 To provision adequate capacity for LANs and WANs,
you need to check for extra bandwidth utilization
caused by protocol inefficiencies and suboptimal
frame sizes or retransmission timers.

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 Broadcast/multicast Behavior
 A broadcast frame is a frame that goes to all
network stations on a LAN.
 At the data link layer, the destination address of a
broadcast frame is FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF (all 1s in
binary).
 A multicast frame is a frame that goes to a
subset of stations.
 For example, a frame destined to
01:00:0C:CC:CC:CC goes to Cisco routers and
switches that are running the Cisco Discovery
Protocol (CDP) on a LAN.
 Layer 2 internetworking devices (switches and bridges),
forward broadcast and multicast frames out all ports.
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 Problem

 The forwarding of broadcast and multicast

frames can be a scalability problem for large flat
networks.
 How to overcome this problem???

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 Solution

 A router does not forward broadcasts or

multicasts.
 All devices on one side of a router are considered
part of a single broadcast domain.
 In addition to including routers in a network
design to decrease broadcast forwarding,
 you can also limit the size of a broadcast domain by
implementing virtual LANs (VLAN).

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 Suggestion

 Too many broadcast frames can overwhelm end

stations, switches, and routers.
 It is important that you research the level of
broadcast traffic in your proposed design and limit
the number of stations in a single broadcast domain.
 Problem  Broadcast Radiation
 broadcasts spreading from the sender to all other devices in
a broadcast domain.
 Broadcast radiation can degrade performance at
network endpoints.

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 Another issue
 The NIC in a network station passes broadcasts
and relevant multicasts to the CPU of the
station.
 Some NICs pass all multicasts to the CPU, even when
the multicasts are not relevant, because the NICs do
not have driver software that is more selective.
 Intelligent driver software can tell a NIC which
multicasts to pass to the CPU.
 Unfortunately, not all drivers have this intelligence.
 The CPUs on network stations  overwhelmed due to high
processing.
 If more than 20 percent of the network traffic is broadcasts or
multicasts, the network segmented using routers or VLANs.

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 Remarks

 In general, however, broadcast traffic is

necessary and unavoidable.
 Routing and switching protocols use broadcasts and
multicasts to share information about the
internetwork topology.

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 Network efficiency

 Characterizing network traffic behavior requires

gaining an understanding of the efficiency of
new network applications.
 Efficiency refers to whether applications and
protocols use bandwidth effectively.
 Efficiency is affected by,
 frame size,
 the interaction of protocols used by an application,
 windowing and flow control
 error-recovery mechanisms

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