Preparation for Performance Management 100 Mbps Lab
Introduction
As was stated in Performance Management 10Mbps Part I of this lab, performance management is one of the five network management categories defined by the ISO. In Part I, you examined delay, throughput, and efficiency for a particular network design. In this lab, you will continue to examine these categories of performance management when key characteristics of a given network are varied.
Explanation and Background
In this lab, you will use the Ethernet LAN network you built in the Performance Management Lab Part I; however, the link rate you will use for this network will be 10 times the bandwidth of the one used in Part I.
You will then analyze the performance of the network by measuring the end-to-end delay, throughput, and network efficiency when the frame sizes of network traffic are varied, as they were in Part I, from a small size (256 bytes) to a medium size (512 bytes) and then to a large size (1,024 bytes) for a fixed network link rate. However, the network will now use a link rate of 100 Mbps (high bandwidth) as opposed to the link rate that was used in Part I, which was 10 Mbps (low bandwidth).
Motivation
In the Performance Management Lab Part I, you analyzed the performance of a shared Ethernet LAN network that was using a low bandwidth (10 Mbps). You examined delay, throughput, and efficiency of the network as it relates to frame size. Serialization delay had a significant impact because of the low bandwidth that was used.
As was pointed out in Part I of this lab, serialization delay is the time it takes for a unit of data to be serialized for transmission on a channel. Serialization delay and frame size are directly proportional. This means that as frame size increases for a fixed channel capacity (bandwidth), serialization delay will increase.
You should have learned from Part I of this lab that when the network bandwidth is low, as was the case for...