A Hierarchical Buffer-Sizing Framework for Congestion Mitigation in Campus Area Networks: An Engineering-Theoretic Approach to the Internet Sluggishness Problem
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56313/jictas.v5i1.532Keywords:
Campus Area Networks Buffer Sizing, Network Congestion Queuing Delay, Hierarchical Network Architecture, Switched LAN Internet Sluggishness, Graph-Theoretic Network DesignAbstract
Campus Area Networks (CANs) in higher educational institutions worldwide have long suffered from Internet sluggishness—a persistent degradation in upload and download throughput that occurs at predictable temporal intervals. Prior investigations have narrowly attributed this phenomenon to insufficient bandwidth, recommending either bandwidth overprovisioning or policy-based management without resolving the problem. This paper advances a fundamentally different, engineering-theoretic explanation and a novel quantitative resolution: the sluggishness is primarily caused by the uniform deployment of identically buffered switches across all hierarchical layers of the network, which violates the traffic aggregation principle intrinsic to layered switched architectures. Using a physically installed university CAN at Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria, we formally derive a Hierarchical Buffer-Sizing (HBS) framework grounded in graph-theoretic tree analysis. The proposed HBS framework yields per-switch buffer size specifications as a function of each switch's subtree cardinality within the network topology. Results show that the required buffer capacity for core-layer switches can be up to 14× greater than that of edge-layer leaf switches, a disparity completely absent in existing installations. Comparative simulation using NS-3 demonstrates that networks configured according to the HBS framework reduce average end-to-end queuing delay by 68.4% and packet drop rate by 73.1% relative to uniform-buffer baselines. The framework is analytically validated against both the small-buffer model of Appenzeller et al. [4] and the very-small-buffer model of Enachescu et al. [6], with all derived buffer values falling within theoretically acceptable bounds. This work provides, for the first time, a deterministic, topology-driven engineering methodology for CAN buffer provisioning that can be directly implemented by network engineers without traffic monitoring prerequisites
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