A measurement study of diskless workstation traffic on an Ethernet

Author

Gusella, Riccardo

Author_Institution

Int. Comput. Sci. Inst., Berkeley, CA, USA

Volume

38

Issue

9

fYear

1990

fDate

9/1/1990 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1557

Lastpage

1568

Abstract

The traffic on a 10-Mb/s Ethernet local-area network that connects diskless workstations to file servers in a university environment is analyzed. The traffic is substantially heavier than has been recorded in previous studies; measured over 1-s intervals, it frequently exceeds 30% of the network bandwidth. The distribution of packet lengths and the patterns of packet interarrival times are interpreted for the three protocols that carry significant traffic: the transmission control protocol (character traffic), the network disk protocol (paging traffic), and the network file system protocol (remote file access traffic). The two latter protocols account for 68% of the packets and 94% of the data bytes on the network. File access to a remote file server generates bursts of traffic that can last several seconds and that demand bandwidths on the order of 120 kB/s, or about 10% of the Ethernet bandwidth

Keywords

local area networks; packet switching; protocols; telecommunication traffic recording; 10 Mbit/s; Ethernet local-area network; character traffic; diskless workstation traffic; distribution of packet lengths; network disk protocol; network file system protocol; packet interarrival times; paging traffic; remote file access traffic; transmission control protocol; university environment; Access protocols; Bandwidth; Communication system traffic control; Control systems; Ethernet networks; File servers; File systems; Local area networks; Telecommunication traffic; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Communications, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0090-6778

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/26.61397

Filename

61397