COMPARISON OF NETWORK TOOLS FOR BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The world has rightly been said once to becoming a ‘small village’. In other words, people are gradually becoming to know each other faster and easier. This has become possible with the help of the internet which has virtually connected every continent on this world together with the click of the mouse. On a daily basis, there is an increase of the number of people who are accessing the internet and everyone everywhere is in need of information of one kind or the other and this has led to vast resources being needed to bring such information. A proper management process is thereby needed to be put in place to manage the resources. This paper introduces three bandwidth management tools - Wireshark, InterMapper Monitoring Software and Paessler Real Time Traffic Grapher- which were compared based on bandwidth utilization, packet loss and cost of operating on an internetworked environment. With the introduction of latency and throughput into the tools, by calculation we could deduce the behaviour of the network usage by the users. Wireshark gave a protocol analysis of each packet sent across the network, without bandwidth usage. InterMapper was both a protocol analyzer and Intrusion Detection Graphical device which polled the network and displayed the bandwidth usage, packet loss and interconnectivity of the devices while Paessler Real Time Grapher, trended the bandwidth utilization with packet loss and predicted the network behaviour. Historical records of the tools were analyzed for proper trending prediction to assist in knowing the growth of the organization in terms of cost to the users. The latency, bandwidth utilization and maximum transfer rate where compared computed, plotted and compared. From the results, Paessler Real Time Grapher came out the best in terms of prediction, trending and cost followed by InterMapper and lastly Wireshark.