Performance Analysis of Ethernet LAN Network Connection under Different Network Devices

Abstract

This paper studies the performance of different network devices in an Ethernet based network environment. That is the performance of Hub, Switch and Bridge in a local area network (LANs) in order to know which among these three network devices mentioned above performs best in terms of packet transfer, collision count and delay. The simulation was carried out using OPNET IT Guru Academic Edition 9.1. To observe the performance of these devices, three scenarios were presented. In the first scenario, the network was connected with one hub and 16 nodes; the second scenario was connected with two hubs and a switch while the third scenario was connected with two hubs and a bridge. These entire scenarios were observed under different Packet sizes 1500 bytes, 1024 bytes and 512 bytes. But it was observed that the higher the packet size the higher the value of some of the performance metrics such as traffic received and delay. On the other hand some performance such as collision count was improving as the packet size reduces from 1500 bytes, 1024 bytes e.t.c. but in some situation the packet size has no significant impact on some performance metric such as traffic sent. The simulation results displayed the level of data traffic observed in the three scenarios.