Assignment Description

The aim of the assignment is to develop an analytical understanding of performance and management of different types of networked applications. The assignment will provide an opportunity to understand network performance and management issues of networked applications using state of the art tools. This exercise provides an opportunity to demonstrate analytical ability of evaluating distributed systems performance, quality of Service and service management.

Overview and General Instructions of Assignment

Each student will need to work on an assigned set of websites and capture packets on their home network. The students are assigned the set of websites based on their MIT ID from Table 1. The set of websites include a website of a news channel and a website for live streaming. The students are required to capture packets of multiple images from the news channel website and capture packets from the live stream website while streaming for 10 minutes on their home network.

Table 1: Website Allocation

Sno.

Website Assigned

Last digit of MIT ID

1

http://www.news.com.au

0 and 9 http:// iview.abc.net.au

2

http://www.nzherald.co.nz

1 and 8

https://www.9now.com.au/live/channel-9

3

https://www.newsroom.co.nz

2 and 7

https://tenplay.com.au/

4

http://tv.australiaplus.com/

3 and 6

https://7live.com.au/

5

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news

4 and 5

https://www.skynews.com.au

 

Part 1:

The first part of the report should be about the general statistics of both captures using Wireshark and that must include:

1. Time of capture

2. Total number of captured packets

3. IP addresses of the client and server

4. Description of the capturing device

Part 2:

The second part of the report must include screen shots of packet capture, screenshots of different statistics from Wireshark and a complete analysis of those screenshots for both websites from part 1. Screenshots of only the graphs or other statistics will not get any marks as those must be analysed in detail to discuss the quality of service for a particular application. Students are required to analyse the network performance for the assigned websites considering the following aspects:

 

1. Throughput

2. Round Trip Time

3. Load Distribution

4. Warnings and errors

5. TCP retransmissions

Part 3:

The third part of the report is about comparing the collected Wireshark statistics of two different types of networked applications and providing reasons for those differences. The graphs and statistics showing different performance aspects of web page transfer and live streaming (provided in part 2) need to be compared with each other. The differences of the performance are to be identified and reasons must be provided for such differences.

Part 4:

Students need to download, install, use and compare another free network performance measurement tool from the Internet on their home computer. One possible option is Microsoft Message Analyzer from https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=44226. The tool should be used to analyse the network traffic captured while accessing one of the news websites mentioned in Table 1. The chosen tool should be compared with Wireshark on the basis of following criteria:

1. Ease of access and use: how easy it is to download, install and start using (any changes to be made to the system, etc.) as compared to Wireshark

2. GUI: Compare at least four GUI features of the chosen tool with Wireshark

3. Visualisation of traffic: after capturing packets by the chosen tool the effectiveness of the visualisation of the network traffic should be compared with Wireshark

4. Statistics generation: at least two types of statistics like throughput, RTT, etc., need to be generated by the chosen tool and are to be compared with the statistics generation ability of Wireshark.

5. Details of HTTP: the details of HTTP traffic provided by the chosen tool should be compared with Wireshark.

MN504 Networked Application Management Assignment 2 Page 4 of 5

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