A performance analysis of management information due to data traffic provisioning in a SONET/SDH communications network

• Main Author: Tay, Yeong Kiang Winston.
• Other Authors: McEachhen, John C.
• Format: Others
• Published: Monterey California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Subjects: SONET (Data transmission); Queuing theory; Data transmission systems; Testing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/1904

An evaluation of the performance of a SONET management system was conducted to better understand its management capabilities due to network disruptions in the presence of a traffic load. This study analyzed the Cisco Transport Manager (CTM) which manages a testbed of four Cisco ONS15454 optical systems. The network was injected with HTTP and FTP traffic generated by the Spirent Smartbits system installed with TeraMetrics Gigabit Ethernet modules and load calibration configured by the Spirent Avalanche software. To simulate real-world situations, power disruptions were applied to the network while collecting CTM traffic using Ethereal. Using queuing analysis, the arrival rates and service times were computed for various CTM traffic components and a utilization for 2500 network elements (NE) extrapolated. Self-similarity analysis was performed and the logvariance was plotted to extract the Hurst values. Finally, the results and findings were compared with prior research for loading and no-loading cases. The results of this study are useful in determining the maximum number of network elements manageable in a disruptive environment. Final analysis on the effects of link utilization on the queue size showed that the CTM is able to manage more NEs when the network is disrupted. Unfortunately, managing more NEs increases the queue size even though the utilization was found to be 0.83 for 5450 NEs. Consequently, in order to maintain a moderate queue size, the maximum number of NEs manageable was found to be 2495. This value is close to CISCO's specification of a CTM server managing a maximum of 2500 NEs.