The usage analysis of web and email traffic on the University Internet backbone links

Abstract

We present our latest study on monitoring and analyzing the behavior of the LSBU (London South Bank University) data network traffic as well as identifying and understanding the usage of http traffic, mail traffic and overall traffic. This analysis of the network activity allows us to calculate accurately the importance of the network traffic characteristics, on a continuous basis, which can identify the data traffic patterns on the overall gateway and highlight the end-to-end performance of the network path. In this paper, the PRTG network monitoring tool (Paessler AG, Germany) has been chosen as this provides the capabilities of SNMP, port utilisation as well as sFlow. The objectives of the study are to point out the impact of the LSBU network performance and its congestions current state; to predict the future data network traffic and congestions; to focus on the usage of mail against the mostly used protocol such as http and https; to identify the venerability of the network, due to high usage in particular time of the day; and to check the capacity usage of the current resources to maximize performance and network utilization.