Wide-Area Data Network Performance Engineering

Using this practical guide, you acquire the skills you need to design a router network carrying a variety of traffic, including Internet and intranet, over frame relay devices. You gain a comprehensive understanding of routers, protocols including TCP/IP, SNA, and Novell, protocol behavior over a WAN, applications, performance engineering, network management and maintenance, and more.

For WAN analysts and managers, this is an indispensable resource to keep on-hand while operating, maintaining, upgrading, or migrating existing networks. It helps you make difficult decisions involving hardware, software, frame relay and private lines, ATM, and application benchmarking to test new applications on the WAN. Sales and marketing professionals dealing with WAN technology will also find this an important reference for understanding the potential of WAN and related multiprotocol applications.

Table of contents

Preface

1. Introduction

Part I: General Principles

2. Wider-Area Networking Technologies

3. Performance Analysis: Some Basic Tools

4. Techniques for Performance Engineering

5. Frame Relay Performance Issues

6. Using Pings for Performance Analysis

Part II: Specific Application/Protocol Suites

7. WAN Performance Analysis of TCP/IP Applications: FTP, HTTP, and Telnet

8. WAN Performance Considerations for Novell Netware Networks

9. WAN Performance Issues for Client/Server Applications

10. WAN Design and Performance Considerations for SNA Networks

Part III: Case Studies

11. Case Studies

Appendix A: Queuing: A Mathematical Disgression

Appendix B: Throughout in Lossy Environments

Appendix C: Definitions

List of Acronyms

About the Authors

Index