On The Last Mile Campus Area Networks’ Aspect Of The Internet Sluggishness Problem

Abstract

With the large-scale deployment of computer networks in the campuses of higher educational institutions around the world in order to avail staff and students of these institutions the means of accessing the Internet for educational and collaboration purposes, network sluggishness when downloading information from the Internet or uploading information to the Internet at certain times of the day and at certain days of the week became a generally observed problem. Researchers in different higher educational institutions around the world have been carrying out researches into this problem in efforts at proffering solution(s) to it: but so far, the problem still persists. The solutions that have been recommended by different researchers for tackling the problem include bandwidth overprovisioning and bandwidth management approaches that involve deploying appropriate bandwidth and network access policies. We aim to illustrate in this paper, utilizing a practically (physically) installed university network the fact that, the sluggishness of these networks is the result of inappropriately installed buffers (in the context of the buffers’ sizes) in the switches/routers that interconnects the end-devices (host equipment) in the networks.