SCALABILITY EVALUATION AND IMPROVEMENT IN IP-BASED CAMPUS NETWORKS: A CASE STUDY OF AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY ZARIA NETWORK

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Department of Engineering

ABSTRACT
This research presents the design and configuration of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology to address scalability issues on a large and complex campus network such as Ahmadu Bello University campus network that is currently designed, configured and implemented with Open Shortest Path First Protocol (OSPF) network. Graphical Network Simulator (GNS3) was used to model and emulate the campus network to identify areas most vulnerable to scalability issues. The network was redesigned and configured with MPLS technology, which showed significant improvement in the speed of CPU, RAM, and link utilizations of the routers and switches as the network resources were accessed. The network was also modeled in OPNET modeler with OSPF and then with MPLS to verify the results obtained using GNS3. The models were configured with network services such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Web, e-mail, voice and video traffic. Traffics were generated at peak hours and data was collected for performance metrics; throughput, delay (end-to-end and queuing), and jitter. The results obtained during the simulation showed that MPLS-Based network have higher throughput from 4,000 (bps) to 81,000 (bps) compared with OSPF network from 3,000 (bps) to 41,000 bps, lower end-to-end delay from 0.0000019 to 0.0000050s compared with 0.000002s to 0.0000092s, lower queuing delay from 0.00002s to 0.000074s compared with 0.000045s to 0.000084s, lower jitter from 0.00005s to 0.0004s compared with 0.00005s to 0.00080s, lower server load of 250,000,000 (bits/sec) compared with 790,000,000 (bits/sec). The validation, based on the developed and simulated configuration was carried out using live routers and switches and the results showed an average reduction of Central Processing Unit (CPU) utilization from about 97.5% for OSPF-based network to about 37% for MPLS-based network, and reduction of Random Access Memory (RAM) utilization from 97% for OSPF-based network to 32% for MPLS-network, there was also reduction in link utilization from 80% for OSPF-based network to 19% for MPLS-based network. The results obtained using MPLS-based network design showed that MPLS network provided more scalable and efficient solution than conventional OSPF network even with the addition of more network services, network devices or end users.