Simulation based Performance Analysis of Wired and Wireless Networks of NUST H-12 Campus using OPNET

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to analyze the performance of the newly established network infrastructure at SEECS, H-12 Campus. At SEECS, a whole new structure of wired and wireless networks have been setup, and presently it is extremely necessary and important to measure quantities like delay, throughput, link utilization, packet losses etc so that future improvements can be easily made. This project, therefore, aims to simulate the current network of SEECS using OPNET, analyze the results and give suggestions for improvement. In this project, the wired and wireless parts of the network have been simulated together under varied types of generated traffic ranging from HTTP, FTP, and SMTP to audio/video streaming and conferencing. The traffic load has been designed to mimic the network usage behavior of a typical user. Simulations have been conducted to gather statistics like utilization, throughput, delays, packet loss, jitter etc followed by an analysis of gathered statistics. Finally, it has also been explored how VLAN provisioning can give QoS improvements for different types of traffic. About OPNET: OPNET (Optimized Network Engineering Tool) is a commercially available network simulation tool that is the first choice of industry since it is easy to train on and a powerful to simulate up to date network technologies. It allows choosing different load intensity for each application type (e.g. heavy, light, etc.) and offers a way to predict the impact of a hardware upgrade, a change in topology, an increase in traffic load or the use of a new application, on the network.