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Calculating Total Network Capacity
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.
Didn't read the article, but I imagine that part of the difficulty is that network capacity isn't reducible to an individual scalar number, but rather looks like an N-dimensional graph. There are many points of failure and bottleneck depending on how each node behaves relative to other nodes.
and the answer is "It Depends". The traffic, the routing, the overall bandwidth (you never get 100% usage) all have factors. The easiest way is to look at your pipes (each segment is separate) and see the error rates, back pressure (QOS, Ethernet, etc.), average throughput breakdown (types of traffic), and usage percentage. This will give you a clear picture. Take those numbers and watch them over time, and you will get a clear picture of your network.
You cannot answer a question such as this truthfully if you take one sample size, and assume that is fact. Many sample sizes make the true picture, and then you can also see trends to determine if things are getting out of control.