JANET Bandwidth Management Advisory Service

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Introduction

Authors and Contributors

The Good Practice Guide was compiled by George Neisser from Manchester Computing, University of Manchester. He is most grateful to all the members of the original Bandwidth Management Advisory Service (BMAS) for their extremely helpful comments and reviews. He is also grateful to Derek Heap and his network team from Blackburn College for their contributions to the case study, in particular the Blackburn Information Technology (IT) policy and its current bandwidth management strategy, and for commenting upon the guide from the perspective of a College of Further Education (FE).

1. Overview

Welcome to the first edition of the BMAS Good Practice Guide, that is intended to be a comprehensive one-stop point of reference for UK education for bandwidth management and all related issues.

1.1 Who Should Read This Document

This document should be read by:

• senior network managers;

• network support staff;

• webmasters and cachemasters;

• creators of high bandwidth data sources.

2. Preamble

This Service has been established to facilitate the efficient use of bandwidth resources within UK educational organisations, (specifically the Higher Education (HE) and FE communities) by offering advice, help, and evaluation and development resources to individual organisations on all matters related to bandwidth management.

Bandwidth capacity is not a limitless resource. As electronic web-based and multi-media based communications grow and the UK education community expands, the demand for bandwidth may be expected to increase exponentially. Simply increasing physical capacity by installing more links to meet this demand is expensive and cannot be done indefinitely. Sooner or later bandwidth management will have to be applied to critical communications links and networks to improve bandwidth usage efficiency. Where usage is approaching maximum capacity this will improve the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by users. Where usage is well below capacity it will reduce the possibility of reaching maximum capacity, especially during peak usage periods. In both scenarios the user will benefit through better overall service quality. Properly implemented, bandwidth management can offer affordable and adaptable solutions to facilitate the delivery of required levels of service.

2.1 Organisational Bandwidth Management Strategy

Generally speaking efficient bandwidth management involves the employment of a wide range of techniques, technologies and local service management policies. The techniques and technologies available include: web caching, content filtering, traffic management, QoS and data compression. Policies include the imposition of policy-based bandwidth limits, and user access and local security policies. Effective management will also require a prioritisation of service requirements and an analysis of network usage.

An organisational bandwidth management strategy will improve bandwidth management. Ideally every organisation should have its own strategy tailored to its own particular operational needs and environment. In practice it is recognised that most organisations will already incorporate various bandwidth management components in the day-to-day operations of their campus networks. However, the concept of a bandwidth management strategy is very useful because it serves to focus attention on all related issues, and it is therefore used as a framework for implementation throughout this guide.

2.2 Present Situation

Several bandwidth management technologies have been in use for some time within UK education. They include access controls, content filtering, and web caches. Their use will continue for the foreseeable future. However, the growth in bandwidth-intensive applications, such as streaming, is driving the development and deployment of the aforementioned traffic management, QoS and data compression technologies, and it now seems likely that these will be increasingly used many organisations in the near future. Accordingly, BMAS is focusing its efforts in all these areas, generating experience and expertise in order to deliver advice to UK education and to produce a comprehensive body of advisory material.

2.3 Good Practice Guide

This Good Practice Guide is an important component of this service. It is divided into four parts:

• Part 1 explains what is meant by bandwidth management and why it is necessary, followed by a discussion of techniques and technologies;

• Part 2 explains how to formulate and implement an organisational bandwidth management strategy;

• Part 3 illustrates a case study of a bandwidth management strategy in practice;

• Part 4 brings it all together in the form of a series of good practice guides and recommendations.