LOS ANDES UNIVERSITY ENGINEERING FACULTY ELECTRIC AND ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

A Simulation of the Performance of a Business Communication Network (September, 2011)

Rafael Caroprese Castro (200811821), David A. Snchez Sarmiento (200813422)
Abstract This document summarizes the results obtained from the simulation of a business network for a threedepartment company (Engineering, Sales and Generic users). Each department used different types of applications supported by one server. Also, simulations were made in order to advise different choices according to changes in the basic parameters of the network. The main results are shown below.

applications and the number of users, and there is no need to improve the network. II. ANALYSIS OF THE RESULTS GIVEN BY CHANGES IN THE PARAMETERS OF THE NETWORK The first scenario studied, apart from the basic, included the case in which the staff of the sales department was doubled. The effect of this change in the performance of the network was low, with an increment of nearly a 2% in the percentage of CPU utilization. The second scenario analyzed the impact of buying a second server to use exclusively for FTP application response. The results showed that there is no need to add another server because the performance doesnt have a substantial improvement. The third scenario summarized the effect of incrementing the size of the FTP packets from 1 MB to 2 MB. The collected statistics showed that the change of this parameter affects greatly the performance of the network. The last scenario evaluated three possibilities. First, given that the average size of the FTP file was duplicated, one possible solution for this traffic increase was adding another server exclusively to respond to this service, helping the old server. Second, the channel capacity of the network could be increased by buying new links 100BaseT, and finally, both solutions mentioned before could be combined. The results of the simulation with these three possibilities showed that adding another server to collaborate implementing the FTP application reduces the network delays and stabilizes the network response as its basic form (the first simulation obtained). Using the mixed solution could reduce even more the delays, but this reduction is insignificant and is cheaper to buy just another server rather than buy a server and meters of 100BaseT link.

I. ANALYSIS OF THE RESULTS GIVEN BY THE SIMULATION OF THE NETWORK According to the parameters of the network, the simulation showed that the network is well dimensioned and there are no critic constraints that could damage its performance. The server is able to respond to all queries made from each application; this can be seen in figure 1, which shows the percentage of usage of the Servers CPU.

Fig. 1. Percentage of usage of the Servers CPU. (X axis, 10 min/div, Y axis, 10%/div)

The response times of each application were low. For instance, BD access and query response time were both 500 ms approx. The FTP response time on the steady state was about 5 seconds. These results clearly expose the fact that the server supports perfectly both the