LEARNStat: A Network Traffic Monitoring Utility

Abstract

Developments in Information and Communication Technology have created many new applications, which require a large amount of bandwidth for proper application usage. However, international bandwidth is an expensive resource especially in this part of the world. Therefore, enterprises that use the Internet for business always need to efficiently use the bandwidth. Knowing the current (and past) usage is an important requirement in estimating the bandwidth requirement of a corporate network. The information of the composition of the use of the bandwidth by application, user group, etc. will help an administrator to efficiently manage it. Existing tools for network traffic monitoring are not capable of providing the above information. This paper examines some of the popular network monitoring tools that are widely used in the Internet community. The paper also presents the solution developed by the authors, i.e. LEARNStat, to monitor and analyze network traffic.