Network Capacity Planning is an aspect of a networked computer system that many IT manager/Network manager forgot to do. Especially for IT managers in a growing company, there are many cases where they got the shocking surprise when their current network infrastructure (seems) suddenly just overwhelmed by the load imposed by its users.

In a WAN (Wide Area Network) environment especially, if a network application will be deployed, it is advised that the company first assess its possible impact on the WAN resources. Because most WAN links has only small bandwidth, even an application that runs fine in a 10 Mbps is still possible to bog down the WAN links when deployed without tested first, making it unusable.

NUS (Network Utility Suite) is a software suite which contains 3 modules, based on client/server architecture. It contains Network Benchmarking, Network Monitoring, and Network Application Simulator modules. This dissertation concerns itself only with the last module, Network Application Simulator, in relation to the interest to network capacity planning.

Each of these modules are done by different people, and presented as a separate project. In the end however, it is intended to merge all of those modules to form a single software suite, called NUS.

NUS’s Network Application Simulator is designed to be able to perform robust simulation on the real network itself, if desired, outside office hours for example. It will also be able to perform it in an isolated environment, in a Testlab for example. The following lists its features:

• Ability to perform simulation on the real network, by simulating the specific application tasks over network between the server and client.
• Ability to test the whole subnet of the WAN (more realistic result, but must be done off-hours to avoid impact to working users), or do the test just in an isolated network environment (less realistic, but can be done anytime) between as little as 2 computers.
• Produce statistical report to the user
• Easy-to-use user interface

The ability to simulate an application on the network could be realised with the aid of a spesialised scripting language (NetSim) that will simulate the behaviour of that particular application. So basically we will have a mini interpreter in this software to interpret the script, translate it into a form understandable by the computer, and run it. Before we can create the script, we need to capture the application’s traffic first by using any packet capture software; such as LANalyzer, Microsoft’s SMS, or some other tools available in UNIX. Then based on the captured information, we can create the script.

The script is very flexible and can be tailored to simulate practically any network traffic scenario. The options menu will provide only basic configurability, for maximum configurability the user will need to tune the script. But since the structure and the syntax of the scripting language is very simple, it should not be a problem.

The application also has a reporting feature. It will report the bandwidth requirement for the duration of the simulation, and will also provide a graphic chart of the simulation process. Therefore user can further analyse the network traffic in much detail, since the graphic chart is quite versatile - we can move/zoom in/zoom out/print the chart easily.

The simulation software produced from this project will be rather basic. One can say that it’s a proof-of-concept software; demonstrating the validity of the student’s hypothesis on network simulation, although still providing basic functionality. But, inside it already has the foundation for further enhancements, so it will be easy to extend the software or to add more features to it.

The student shall continue to maintain this project. In the event of his inability to continue maintaining the project, the student intend to release the full source code to a trusted third-party or put it on the Internet, whichever in his judgement will provide the best benefit to the community; so to enable further development of the software. MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher software) is one prove of many that by providing your source code to the community, you’ll accelerate its development (http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html#HIST).

All software released from this project will be available for free for use by educational and government institutions. And in addition to it, full source code will be made available to educational institutions on request, to encourage further development and study of this topic. Distribution of the software will be done by utilising the Internet.

This article is M.Eng thesis of Harry Sufehmi (University of Central England in Birmingham).

1. Network Capacity Planning with Network Application Simulator

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