Design Guidelines for Switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet Networks

Today's broadcast based shared media networks are beginning to be the bottleneck of computer systems in many organizations. A new networking paradigm, frame and cell switching, promises to meet the ever-increasing demands for network services. The objective of this project is to create design guidelines for designing switched network. The restriction was made to only focus on layer 2 switching in IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet) and IEEE 802.3u (Fast Ethernet) networks. Performing benchmark tests on a few different network architectures, and then comparing the results, helped forming the guidelines. In our benchmark test we had nine clients and one server. The only computer the clients communicated with was the server, where clients did not communicate with each other. The results showed that there was no benefit of using a switch as long as the server was connected to the switch at 10 Mbps. The results also showed that using switches in a wrong way could have negative effect on the throughput of the network. As expected when the switch was used in the right way, the throughput increased significantly