NETW410 Week 1 Lab Report

NETW410, Professor
Current Date: 1/11/14
Lab 1: OPNET LAN Modeling Tutorial
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Week 1 iLab Report
The first objective in the LAN Modeling tutorial is Setting Up the Scenario. The final step in setting up your scenario appears below.

1. (30 points) Once your project is created (after Step 6 above), your workspace will contain a map of the United States. Your project and scenario name can be seen in ITGuru’s top window border in the form of Project: <project name> Scenario: <scenario name>.

Capture a screenshot of your new project workspace that clearly shows your project and scenario name, and paste it below.

2. (40 points) In college-level paragraph(s), describe how background traffic affects both e-mail data and VoIP data.
In this week’s lab exercise, we had the opportunity to create a network simulation from the ground up using OpNet IT Guru. The purpose of the exercise was to gain familiarity with OpNet functions along with network objects and associated behavior based on the configuration of network variables. Some of these objects include Application Definitions, Profile Definitions, Subnets, and the various means of connecting these components in a topology.
The lab exercise itself provided a foundation for creating a simulated environment that was focused on evaluating the impact of background link load on FTP traffic. After creating the initial simulation environment, we were able to validate the configuration by matching output data for FTP performance with the reference data provided in the iLab instructions document. The graphs below illustrate the student lab configuration findings compared with the iLab reference graphs. The graphs, while not an exact match, provide enough similarity to validate the student simulation environment. Both email and VoIP are important to a company without the two, a company will have a hard time communicating as well as have a hard time competing in today’s business world. Throughout this essay I will also get the chance to talk about bandwidth, QOS (Quality of Service) and how it pertains to email and VoIP data. I will have the chance to explain and describe how background traffic affects both e-mail data and VoIP data.
Bandwidth, according to the website webopedia, bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second or bytes per second.
Furthermore, for analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second, or Hertz. The main reason traffic is affected is because it takes up a lot of bandwidth to come through clear. For example, let’s say you have a 1.5 Meg T1, which is fine for a voice calls using the proper codec, but throw a video download on that line, along with some email downloads, while trying to make a call and it will slow everything down.
To continue, in order to have everything working properly the network engineer would have to use QOS. About.com defined QOS as a board collection of networking technologies and techniques. About.com also states the goal of QOS is to provide guarantees on the ability of a network to deliver predictable results. Both email and VoIP are bandwidth hogs if you don't use QOS on your network it will literally bring your network to a crawl if you aren't using codec’s to compress and QOS. A good way to eliminate this problem is to add VLAN’s.
In conclusion, the reason traffic is affected is because it takes up so much bandwidth to come through clear. The way people get around these things is QOS (quality of service). You allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for voice. Let’s say for instance you have a 1.5 meg T1 that is all fine for a voice call using the proper codec but throw a video download on that line, along with some email downloads, and then try to make a call and it will slow everything down if you aren't using QOS and giving voice priority.