Network traffic monitoring in an industrial environment

With most Universities and Colleges adopting the use of e-learning to provide daily activities for learning, google search and other search engines for research, Internet is then referred to be a critical component of success by the researchers, lecturers and students. Analyzing network traffic is usually a challenging task for network administrators due to the types and complexity of traffic. The growing demand and usage of Internet from both students and staff in university networks also add to the challenges in the network traffic analyses. Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) network is expected to have growing number of hosts with the growing number of staff and students and will be used as the case study. This paper analyzed network usage in BIUST network system hence identifies unproductive network based applications responsible for consuming valuable bandwidth. The bandwidth was monitored using monitoring software called packet sniffer. Packet sniffer (using Ethereal Wireshark version 1.12.4.) was configured as a gateway between the University network system and the Internet over a week monitoring period (working hours of the days), and 60-day monitoring period in a schedule of at least 15 minutes daily, and at least twice a week and 8 times in a month. The data (packets) captured were analyzed using MATLAB which is a tool for graphing network data, and the graphs shows that bandwidth available for the BIUST network system was mostly consumed by non-research based applications. Through this research, future recommendations regarding the BIUST network system is provided.