Measurement of packet generation and communication characteristics in Ethernet system

The authors measured and studied some communication characteristics such as the packet generation rate, generated packet length and frequency, and so on in a real Ethernet system. To have precise and concrete data for the real packet generation rate, packet length and so on is very useful for the network and network equipment designers and engineers. The communication contents measured are (1) FTP, (2) Telnet, (3) X-window, (4) NFS, (5) communication for wordprocessor use, (6) broadcast such as RIP, ARP, RARP. The measured results show some interesting characteristics and one can know some concrete characteristics for the real Ethernet system though the characteristics of the system may depend on the scheme, the communication contents, the user´s environment and so on. Moreover the measured results show that the generating characteristics of each node is different based on the node´s role such as the server node or the client node. Then to clarify the communication characteristics in the network system brings much useful information for network simulation. For using the data, the authors made the packet generating source model of the network simulation and investigated the difference between the very detailed model considering some communication characteristics and an undetailed model in some simulations