Diskless workstation traffic characterization in a university environment

Abstract

This study seeks to provide a traffic characterization of a network consisting of diskless workstations. Traffic is characterized hierarchically as intra-LAN, inter-LAN, and LAN-to-WAN and compared at the application, transport, and medium access layers. Traffic is also compared with the traffic on a network with diskfull workstations. The results provide a quantitative measure of the network behavior and a basic qualitative understanding of some of the possible network management problems that might occur in practice.