Performance analysis of internet protocol (ip) networks for the ministry of foreign affairs and international cooperation

The 21St Century has seen the convergence of different sectors through modern digital technology into Internet Protocol (IP) networks with multimedia capabilities for voice, data, images and video. The requirement differences for these services in terms of bandwidth, delay and loss have posed a challenge on the Quality of Service (QoS) and performance that IP networks need to integrally operate at. Through research and modern technology; communications and tele-traffic engineering fields have come up with various techniques to evaluate, analyse and find sources of performance degradation in IP networks. In this dissertation, performance analysis for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation's (MFAIC's) IP based networks was carried out. It was observed that the networks experienced performance related problems such as signal loss, poor connection response and slow access to network resources. Since there was no any study made before to identify causes of the problems, available performance analysis techniques were explored and a designed direct measurement scheme used to analyse performance in one of the MFAIC IP networks. The source of observed performance degradation was found to be interrelated to the link speed. Network security management and associated issues was found to be another cause of degradation. Cost effective performance optimization remedies which can resolve the discerned performance bottlenecks have been recommended at the end.