Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering (IND) of the University of Stuttgart
Using Flows for Analysis and Measurement of Internet Traffic
Diploma Thesis
Siegfried Löffler
The rapid growth of the Internet and the growing demand for network-intensive multimedia applications during the last years has created new problems for network managers. Larger and faster TCP/IP networks need to be handled in an efficient way. Tools have to be developed that allow the analysis and measurement of traffic at high line speeds in order to provide information needed for network configuration and planning, to resolve congestion problems and for user accounting and charging.
This report gives an overview of web based network management solutions. The traffic flow based methodology [15] is introduced as a means to analyze and monitor traffic. Measurement applications employing flow methodologies are compared. Finally, a Java based Internet traffic flow analyser is presented. This analyzer communicates via SNMP with applications that use the IETF real-time traffic flow measurement architecture [4,5,27]. The tool allows network managers to obtain flow-based network status information in real-time using a standard web browser.
Please note that the focus of this work is not to be seen on flow methodology and traffic characterization itself. Its aim merely is to give an overview over existing methodologies and to examine the possibilities to integrate these techniques into the Web environment using Java.