Relative suitability of router based traffic monitoring techniques for WLAN (Wireless local area network) environment

The wireless communications has revolutionized human life, but has also created several issues relating to its usage. One of the biggest issues involved in use of the wireless communications is related to network performance. The process of refining the network routine by changing activities, methods, procedures, and tools that pertain to the operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning of networked systems is network management. Network operations will be executed by authenticated authorities like administrator. The increasing complexity of networks has promulgated a dire need for monitoring the traffic of the network which helps to identify any failure in the performance of the network. It also helps to identify attacks in the network and predicts the network status. This paper evaluates the performance of router based network traffic monitoring techniques such as SNMP, RMON and Netflow and the implementation of these techniques is carried out to ascertain the most effective monitoring technique among the three. The NS-2 simulator is used for implementation. SNMP performs better than the other two methods for WLAN.