A measurement study of diskless workstation traffic on an Ethernet

The traffic on a 10-Mb/s Ethernet local-area network that connects diskless workstations to file servers in a university environment is analyzed. The traffic is substantially heavier than has been recorded in previous studies; measured over 1-s intervals, it frequently exceeds 30% of the network bandwidth. The distribution of packet lengths and the patterns of packet interarrival times are interpreted for the three protocols that carry significant traffic: the transmission control protocol (character traffic), the network disk protocol (paging traffic), and the network file system protocol (remote file access traffic). The two latter protocols account for 68% of the packets and 94% of the data bytes on the network. File access to a remote file server generates bursts of traffic that can last several seconds and that demand bandwidths on the order of 120 kB/s, or about 10% of the Ethernet bandwidth.<
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