Impact of background utilization and background traffic on the foreground applications in a wide area network

Abstract

In the real scenarios, network utilization widely depends on the background traffic and the number of active users. This paper presents the effect of background traffic on the QoS of foreground traffic by varying the utilization of LAN devices, server, and bandwidth. We designed a WAN (Wide Area Network) using the OPNET simulator, which consists of different Local Area Networks (LANs) located in different cities. We considered a foreground GSM quality voice traffic, and FTP heavy and video conference background traffic. The experimental results demonstrated that the channel bandwidth utilization has much effect on the QoS of foreground traffic. In addition, heavy background traffic highly affects the QoS of foreground traffic due to the network congestion.