Laboratory 8 - Network Design

Objectives

1. Gain more experience with the use of OpNet and its modeling and higher level simulation capabilities
2. Examine some of the factors that must be considered when designing a network
3. Observe the impact that different design decisions have on network performance

Preparation

This week, you will be doing another lab using the OpNet simulator. For this one, you will be designing a network for use by a company with multiple departments. You will then analyze network performance to see how the network is being utilized.

This is another experiment from the Network Simulation Experiments Manual by Emad Aboelela. This is experiment 4, Network Design.

In Lab Activities

Boot your machine in Windows and start OpNet then open the Network Design experiment in a browser and follow the instructions. After you have completed the steps in the experiment, do the four questions at the end of the lab - the last two questions involves creating two additional scenarios to study the effect of changes in the structure of the network and the servers.

You should end up with the following graphs for the SimpleNetwork and BusyNetwork scenarios: the page response time, plus four other statistics of your choosing. You should also have the graphs for the CPU utilization for each of the three servers in the BusyNetwork scenario, the CPU utilization for the Q3_OneServer, and the page response time for the Q4_FasterNetwork scenario.

Your lab report should include the following information:

• A description of the network you simulated and the different scenarios you ran
• A brief description of the statistics you captured for each scenario and the parameters you used when running the simulation (for example, what was the duration of the simulation)
• The graphs you captured from the simulations
• Your answers to questions 1 - 4, including any graphs you generated
• Any conclusions you draw from the experiment

Make sure that you are following Anthony's submission guidelines. Write up a reasonable lab report. As you discovered last week, you'll need to save the report as a PDF file so it is a reasonable size.

The lab write-up is due by the end of the day Wednesday (i.e. 11:59 PM) for the Tuesday lab section and by the end of the day Friday for the Thursday lab section.