Traffic management in rural networks

Abstract

The internet is increasingly present in people's lives, being used in diverse tasks, such as checking e-mail up to online gaming and streaming. The so-called "killer applications" are applications that, when not properly identified and prevented, have more impact on the network, making it slow. When these applications are used on networks with limited resources, as happens in rural networks, they cause a large load on the network, making it difficult its use for work purposes. It is important then to recognize and characterize this traffic to take action so that it does not cause network problems. With that in mind, the work presented in this paper describes the research and identification of cost free traffic analysis solutions that can help to overcome such problems. For that, we perform preliminary testing and a performance comparison of those tools, focusing on testing particular types of network traffic. After that, we describe the analysis and subsequent modification of the source code for storing important traffic data for the tests, as well as the test scenarios in laboratory and real-life environments. These tasks are aimed on collecting information that assists in taking action to improve the allocation of network resources to priority traffic. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.