LAN Packet Trace Analysis-What is the Extent of WWW Traffic\ulcorner

LAN 패킷 분석을 통한 WWW이 통신상에 끼치는 영향

Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the quick growth of the world Wide Web (WWW) traffic raises the question whether past LAN packet traces still reflect the current situation or whether they have become obsolete. For this study, several LAN packet traces were obtained by monitoring the LAN of a typical academic environment. The tools for monitoring the network were a stand-alone HP LAN Protocol Analyzer as well as the free-ware software tool tcpdump. Our main focus was placed on acquiring a low-level overview of the LAN traffic. Thus, we could determine what protocols were mainly used and how the packet sizes were distributed. In particular, we were interested in establishing the amount of WWW traffic on the LAN, and what MIME-Types this traffic is subdivided into. Our results indicate that in a typical academic environment such as ours, conventional sources of LAN traffic such as NFS are still predominant, whereas WWW traffic plays a rather marginal role. Furthermore, we verified that a large portion of the network packets contains little or no data at all, while another significant portion of the packets has sizes around the MTU. Consequently, research in the networking field has to direct its focus on issues beyond the WWW.