INTRODUCTION

The aim of this Project Proposal is to put forward the main topics and ideas of my Final year Project and to give the reader a mild but precise understanding of what they are about see and what to expect when they read the Final year Project.

I have been allocated project 14, which is:  “Investigating queuing and compression techniques in Wide Area Networks (WAN).”

During this project I am going to focus and elaborate on two of the most important techniques used in WAN to improve network performance these are: queuing, and compression.

WAN bandwidth management is necessary to keep the network running in optimal condition; bandwidth management requires effective prioritization of business-critical data.

Local Area Network (LAN) applications place a high restrain over WAN links due to excessive amounts of data being transferred.

Link speed must also be considered, in the past 2400 bps was considered a high transmission rate. However as technology has evolved transmission speeds of 64 kbps are now common.

Point to Point leased lines, and X.25 are normally also used in WAN transmission services, and as new services come along such as: Frame Relay, Switched Multimegabite Data Service (SMDS), Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) at Primary Rate Interface (PRI) and Basic Rate Interface (BRI) rates, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) greater transmission speed can be gained, perhaps a drawback to this though, is the cost, which can influence what kind of service will be employed according to the needs and the budget for the network.