Raising the Bar

The whole goal of network management has long been to keep the network foundation operational – a large and complex task in and of itself. That goal has grown even loftier and with good reason. Identifying bottlenecks, measuring bandwidth utilization and tracking traffic patterns are also necessary for tuning the network so that it can deliver the metrics (capacity, packet loss, latency, jitter) that each application type requires.

Real-time traffic, for example, requires greater predictability and reliability than store-and-forward data traffic. A voice session actually consumes very little bandwidth; generally 30 Kbps to 90 Kbps, depending on audio codec1 used. But it requires that amount of bandwidth consistently with no dropped packets and minimal delay. The challenge is that voice over IP (VoIP) is increasingly co-residing on networks carrying other application traffic that might get in its way.