Evaluation of the Processing Workload for Two Models of Communication Control in IP Networks

In standard IP networks, the control of communication of individual connections is an important aspect of network management. Generally, we distinguish two models of communication control. One is based on the exploitation of standard mechanisms, such as IP filtering, port blocking, routing rules, deployed along the path between the client and the server. We refer to these mechanisms as infrastructure-based management model. On the other hand, the control can be carried out by controlling the client machines of every user. This new model is a client-side management model, and it has been realized in our previous work, by means of a dedicated framework we called DACS. Essentially, DACS distributes the control within the client machines. Therefore, also the network management processing workload is distributed. While in our previous work we investigated functions of DACS scheme and network services, here we are more concerned with analyzing the processing workload due to communication control demanded to the client machines in practical networks. In this regard, we evaluate DACS performance from the point of view of the processing load and demonstrate by some preliminary experiments that DACS framework is better than infrastructure-based management models. From this result, we conclude that, DACS outperforms existing solutions for the communication control problem, because it can control a whole local area network by distributed control of client machines, with an acceptable increase of the processing workload.