Hello All,
I am interested in any studies regarding utilization of Ethernet
links, specially first level links from hosts to edge switches. To the
best of my knowledge, the only studies are the 1998 and 2003 studies
by Odlyzko and the 2005 study by Pang, et al presented at IMC 2005.
These studies show that typical utilization over a time period of one
hour or more is around 1% or less.

Are there any other studies regarding utilization of Ethernet links?
Especially any that show higher levels of utilization than mentioned
above?

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Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 12 Sep 2006 19:23 PDT

Hello Chamarag,

Are you looking for studies specifically for Ethernet or for network
utilization in general? Your reference to the paper by Odlyzko would
make me believe you are more interested in the latter - but I cannot
be sure.

The paper by Pang which does focus on networks within an enterprise
(primarily Ethernet) seems to back up some empirical evidence I've
noticed at several facilities. There are certainly periods of high
link utilization (e.g., during bulk copy of files between systems) but
most networks are quite lightly loaded.

Some exceptions I am aware of include:

 o Network performance testing such as
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-88-4.pdf
which has the results of Ethernet performance measurements done at
Digital's Western Research Labs in 1988.

 o the side effects of bot attacks such as that done to GRC.com and described at
  http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
and
  http://www.grc.com/dos/drdos.htm
These papers also provide some workarounds for overcoming these kinds
of attacks. In a similar manner, the "slashdot effect"
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
has similar effects (though generally without the malicious intent).
Though in this case, the increased load is "temporary" (a few hours to
a few days).

 o Ethernets within clusters such as
http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/products/ps4324/c1244/cdccont_0900aecd8017a1ab.pdf
(admittedly a Cisco reference showing alternatives in interconnects)
  http://lqcd.fnal.gov/trends.html
(an overview of computational and interconnect trends)
and several other references from searches such as
 ethernet cluster measured bandwidth

There are also several clusters (or Grids) that provide some form of
network utilization reports - you may want to check out Ganglia at
  http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/
for links to code (and methods to find such clusters). If you are at
such a cluster report, look up the bytes in / bytes out metrics. Many
clusters do have occasional traffic - others have quite significant
traffic over longer periods, it depends on the applications loaded on
the cluster.

You may also find several good references through a search at Citeseer such as
  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1494995/0
which lists papers that refer to one of the papers by Odlyzko. That
particular link is the first hit on Google when using the phrase
  site:citeseer.ist.psu.edu ethernet utilization percent

Please respond to this clarification request so I can do some more
focused searches and prepare a more complete answer.

  --Maniac

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Clarification of Question by chamarag-ga on 13 Sep 2006 06:11 PDT

Hello,
Thank you for the reply. I am interested in studies regarding the
utilization of Ethernet links in a LAN environment, especially first
level links from desktop users to edge switches.

You are quite correct, the study by Odlyzko is on network utilization
in general - but he does briefly study Ethernet LAN usage and
concludes that average utilization is less than 1%.

Thanks!

-- ChamaraG