When the information superhighway arrives at the neighborhood, a residential network will connect home appliances to the community access network. These appliances include personal computers, printers, and video clients. Among all local-area network (LAN) protocols, Ethernet is the most economic and the most popular. The unique characteristics of residential networks call for new performance studies. A residential network typically has few nodes and runs different applications than business and academic LANs. Consequently, residential networks have traffic characteristics different from the subject of existing studies. We constructed a residential network testbed to collect typical application traffic statistics. Additional live traffic characterization was obtained from campus networks. Also, we investigated the suitability of Ethernet for video distribution through simulation. This paper discusses the design issues for residential networks and presents a network design that is based on Ethernet technology. Traffic models are established from the actual traffic traces and used for the performance evaluation of residential networks. Furthermore, several future data traffic scenarios are considered with bandwidth up to 6 Mb/s by scaling up current data traffic. The simulation results of the performance suggest that Ethernet can be used as a cost-effective residential network for video and data communications.

Design and evaluation of an Ethernet-based residential network

IMA: technical foundations, application and performance analysis

With the development of the OSI reference model, the role of standardisation in the development of computer communications systems has become well-accepted.

The Performance Monitoring of Computer Communications Systems

When the information superhighway arrives at the neighborhood, a residential network will connect home appliances to the community access network. These appliances include per- sonal computers, printers, and video clients. Among all local-area network (LAN) protocols, Ethernet is the most economic and the most popular. The unique characteristics of residential networks call for new performance studies. A residential network typically has few nodes and runs different applications than business and academic LAN's. Consequently, residential networks have traffic characteristics different from the subject of existing studies. For this work, we constructed a residential network testbed to collect typical application traffic statistics. Additional live traffic characterization was obtained from campus networks. Also, we investigated the suitability of Ethernet for video distribution through simulation. This paper discusses the design issues for residential networks and presents a network design that is based on Ethernet technol- ogy. Traffic models are established from the actual traffic traces and used for performance evaluation of residential networks. Furthermore, several future data traffic scenarios are considered with bandwidth up to 6 Mbls by scaling up current data traffic. The simulation results on performance reported here suggest that Ethernet can be used as a cost-effective residential network for video and data communications.

Evaluatio of an Et net-Based

The primary concern of the paper is the characterisation of traffic on a network which will lead to the development of a model of that traffic. This can be achieved by analysing the results from measurements of network traffic. Of especial interest is the traffic generated by each particular application using the network. The authors have investigated the traffic patterns produced from the use of an electronic mail system. This, together with results from other studies has led to the proposal of a set of criteria which characterise traffic on a per application basis.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/1257/5282/00206299.pdf

R.M. Strachan

Papers

The characterisation of network applications-parameters for artificial traffic generation