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Calculating Total Network Capacity

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the information-theory-at-work dept.

New submitter slashbill writes "MIT's working on a way to measure network capacity. Seems no one really knows how much data their network can handle. Makes you wonder about how then do you calculate expense when building out capacity? From the article: 'Recently, one of the most intriguing developments in information theory has been a different kind of coding, called network coding, in which the question is how to encode information in order to maximize the capacity of a network as a whole. For information theorists, it was natural to ask how these two types of coding might be combined: If you want to both minimize error and maximize capacity, which kind of coding do you apply where, and when do you do the decoding?'" This is a synopsis of the first of two papers on the topic.

4 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Plot traffic, establish a norm, compare history by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Best way I've found to measure growth is to have a running history of traffic on each router. You don't need a $billion to do it. There are some decent enough FOSS tools out there to do it. MRTG or Cacti will work nicely and integrate with SNMP.

    For a smaller network, you could run a span port and graph your own data with a shell script, or hook up NTOP. which will give you real-time views of traffic but you would need to implement something to save those reports daily.

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    1. Re:Plot traffic, establish a norm, compare history by ender- · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think they're trying to do something a bit more detailed and theoretical than seeing how much traffic is going through a given interface...

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    2. Re:Plot traffic, establish a norm, compare history by bengoerz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Best way I've found to measure growth is to have a running history of traffic on each router. You don't need a $billion to do it. There are some decent enough FOSS tools out there to do it. MRTG or Cacti will work nicely and integrate with SNMP.

      For a smaller network, you could run a span port and graph your own data with a shell script, or hook up NTOP. which will give you real-time views of traffic but you would need to implement something to save those reports daily.

      You suggest some good tools, but they primarily measure network utilization rather than capacity. The question isn't "how much data is my network handling now" but "how much data could my network handle at peak"?

  2. Re:Limiting factor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    By channel you mean "a network of noisy, independent, memoryless point-to-point channels"? The result in the paper says that
    such channel can be seen as a network of error free channels. On such network it is already known that network coding delivers
    a better performance than routing alone. (see the butterfly network example in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_coding)