Performance investigation of Ethernet LANs for educational computer systems

Concentrated educational computer systems at colleges and universities may have thousands of registered users and hundreds of workstations. Distributed file systems such as NFS are utilized in those systems for access to public data and the users' private data from every workstation. In those systems, avoidance of the large traffic properties caused by many users' continuous operations is one of the most important issues. We model the users' behavior in educational computer systems, and simulate and analyze the traffic of the Ethernet LAN under access concentration to the file server. Six variations of Ethernet LAN including traditional CSMA/CD Ethernet and switched Ethernet are assumed. From the results of the simulation, we conclude that shared gigabit Ethernet will be the most cost-effective for educational systems.