Question

how do you estimate the download protocol overhead or percentage of the download bytes taken up by protocol overhead on wireshark

Answer 1

answer :

Wireshark: This lab uses the Wireshark software tool to capture and examine a packet trace. A packet trace is a record of traffic at a location on the network, as if a snapshot was taken of all the bits that passed across a particular wire. The packet trace records a timestamp for each packet, along with the bits that make up the packet, from the lower-layer headers to the higher-layer contents. Wireshark runs on most operating systems, including Windows, Mac and Linux. It provides a graphical UI that shows the sequence of packets and the meaning of the bits when interpreted as protocol headers and data. It color-codes packets by their type, and has various ways to filter and analyze packets to let you investigate the behavior of network protocols. Wireshark is widely used to troubleshoot networks. You can download it from www.wireshark.org if it is not already installed on your computer.

Running Wireshark requires root privileges. On your own machine, that shouldn't be a problem. For use on attu and the lab Linux workstations, there is a special installation of Wireshark at /usr/sbin/wireshark that doesn't require root, but limits you to examining log files (rather than capturing live data from the network). (Note: Do NOT just issue the command 'wireshark' on CSE machines. That will launch a version that will fail (on an insufficient privileges problem). Instead, give the full pathname to the correct version, /usr/sbin/wireshark.)

Launch Wireshark from the command line. Select "Open" on the screen that appears to open the log file.

wget / curl: This lab uses wget (Linux and Windows) and curl (Mac) to fetch web resources. wget and curl are command-line programs that let you fetch a URL. Unlike a web browser, which fetches and executes entire pages, wget and curl give you control over exactly which URLs you fetch and when you fetch them. Under Linux, wget can be installed via your package manager. Under Windows, wget is available as a binary; look for download information on http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/. Under Mac, curl comes installed with the OS. Both have many options (try wget --help or curl --help to see) but a URL can be fetched simply with wget URL or curl URL .

PROTOCOL OVERHEAD :

Estimate the download protocol overhead, or percentage of the download bytes taken up by protocol overhead. To do this, consider HTTP data (headers and message) to be useful data for the network to carry, and lower layer headers (TCP, IP, and Ethernet) to be the overhead. We would like this overhead to be small, so that most bits are used to carry content that applications care about. To work this out, first look at only the packets in the download direction for a single web fetch. You might sort on the Destination column to find them. The packets should start with a short TCP packet described as a SYN ACK, which is the beginning of a connection. They will be followed by mostly longer packets in the middle (of roughly 1 to 1.5KB), of which the last one is an HTTP packet. This is the main portion of the download. And they will likely end with a short TCP packet that is part of ending the connection. For each packet, you can inspect how much overhead it has in the form of Ethernet / IP / TCP headers, and how much useful HTTP data it carries in the TCP payload. You may also look at the HTTP packet in Wireshark to learn how much data is in the TCP payloads over all download packets.