The History Of Short Message Service

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The term network monitoring basically describes the use of a system that continuously monitors a computer network. Normally network monitor software can recognize the present network problems even before the problem develops or before the system crashes.

In today’s computer networks there is a large mixed collection of computer terminals, routers, switches and many other devices which constitute to the functioning of the system. The network always grows with time; with the needs of the users growing the network also grows in size to accommodate those changes. As these networks increase in size researcher has to monitor or manage these networks, for the mere reason that these networks have a very large database of users who are doing their daily business and transactions over the internet, and an outage or slow network connection would result in loss.

Network faults can cause downtime, network degradation and hence affect the performance of the network users. A fault management system detects logs and notifies the administrator remotely to resolve the problem so that the network stays up and running. Once the problem is identified, it has to be resolved and the solution tested and deployed on the fault systems.

A downtime on a network now costs to large amounts of money. This fact makes that now time, network administrators and system managers keep a close eye on how the network works. With today’s technology it has become easier as computers are good at monitoring other computers and that leads to computerize some task to a certain extent.

Network monitoring is a workstation network's methodical effort to identify slow or failing network components, for instance bandwidth problem, overloaded, failing routers or switches or other problematic devices. In the occasion of a network failure or related outage, the network monitoring systems will warnings the network administrator. (Shiyong, 2010)

Bandwidth speaks of the amount of info that can be transmitted over a network in a given total of time, commonly expressed in bps or bits per second. It is frequently confused by speed. Speed is the duration of time it takes for one piece of info to transmit from point A to point B. Generally, the greater the bandwidth the faster the transmission speeds of the information, while low bandwidth brings that the transfer speeds of information were slow then we have to wait rather more time to transmission of the same amount of information.

Bandwidth monitoring is one of the most serious actions for network administrator in an enterprise indeed. Bandwidth Monitoring is a technique of tracking all the network connections as well as tracking the amount of data flowing across a network as well. Bandwidth Monitoring would aid administrators find problem areas on a network. (Bolliger & Gross, 2001)

Any and each process on the network is depends on the bandwidth of the channels as well as equipment used and the total performance of the network depends on advanced configured bandwidth monitoring system indeed. That is the reason that it is so significant to keep track of the bandwidth usage. By having an improved system that controlled monitoring event, any bandwidth usage or lack of bandwidth problem can be informed and problem can be solved.

The request of bandwidth monitoring tools and implementing of it begin when network administrator understands that there should be a specific device for visualize the flow of the existing bandwidth usage, health of the bandwidth usage as well as the traffic for the regular network activity.

With the advance of a system with Short Message Service (SMS) alert device to examine as well as observe and monitor the health of the network environment, network administrator may know if there is any kind of problem and become to resolve the problem in the proper time.

Scope and objectives

Scope

Whole of bandwidth monitoring and alert via Short Message Service SMS will take place in LAN area. Developer of this system can do the monitoring and observing experiment for the future system based on the alert that the system going to send to administrator and making the right move and action to solve the problem immediately .

The main concern of the final application of this study would be monitoring the network bandwidth which can be home network or office network and in specific cases in which there are defined rules it would automatically inform the administrator regarding the bandwidth drop via TXT message (SMS). Therefore, alongside with monitoring the current send and receive information as the core component of the software the ability of informing the user via the mentioned method would be considered as the special feature of this application which the lack of its existence is noticeable within the current available software in the market.

Objectives

According to the stated above, the researcher needs a monitoring tool which has high performance, overcoming the disadvantages of portable network analysis products. It can store network data for a long time and retrieve historical data of a specific time range, thereby benchmarking network performance and auditing network user activities with forensics, the system should be able to do the following:

To develop a bandwidth monitoring software that helps the administrator to monitor the condition of the bandwidth.

To develop and alert system to alert administrator via SMS if the bandwidth is lower than the threshold that administrator define.

As the additional function, the system will be established to monitor services, such as WWW, FTP, SMTP and alert administrator.

To develop and build a web interface for viewing current network status, warning and history log files

Software will be developed in a way that is able to monitor the health of the bandwidth and the services on the windows platform. There are 3 services to be monitored such as WWW, FTP, and SMTP. For bandwidth monitoring, an alert will be send through SMS to administrator when the download speed is lower than the threshold defined.

Project plan

This project will be very beneficial when a network administrator wants to response fast to any occurring network problem. There may be unseen problems which the project may face and even compatibility issues may arise. The data is real time data from a network so researcher need to understand how to harness this data to develop our tool, researcher will have to test the data on prototype models for each aspect of the monitoring, this would be a very tedious task and one constraint would be time, the researcher need use a step by step methodology to reach the goals and objectives.

The importance of this project is to the solving of the problems in a step by step way so that researcher has a better and quicker management environment. The tool will work as a reporting system for the administrator so that immediate actions can be taken to diagnose the problems before it leads to any network outages. This project is valuable as it will save them time by doing remote monitoring via SMS application.

The design is an exhaustive part of the project as it will collect data and implement many tests on the network. The researcher needs to gather data from the network with our tool and then see how it behaves under different conditions. Researcher required fulfilling our aims and objectives and working on the problems which may arise.

The project will be in four phases, firstly the research phase which will look into the domain under which the researcher will be working. In this part, the researcher will do through study of the problem in hand, and what other researchers have done or are doing at the moment. The researcher will propose a model to follow after gathered information from our findings and will create a step by step method to move forward with our project. This phase will be the setting stone for the things that would like to achieve.

The second phase will be the actual designing of the network monitor, this would be the technical part of the project where the researcher would piece in the information previously obtained and the best design methodology will be used to create our tool.

The third phase will be the testing of the network monitor. Testing will be done and data will be collected at this point. The data would be statistical in nature and not empirical as the researcher will have hard data taken or captured straight from the source.

The last phase will be the evaluation of the system. How it works under various conditions and what are the limitations that face. The researcher try to see what features can be implemented in future to enhance the performance and improve the functionality.

Evaluation

Bandwidth monitoring for being a network administrator, is one of the elementary things that an administrator required to know about it. However to generate a bandwidth monitoring tools, really require lot of thing that need to be focused. There are a lot of important things that require to be understood before progress another step of developing a monitoring tool.

Finding weaknesses from the earlier system is one of the best ways to improve the system indeed. This is because it will make the future system more dependable and particular. Rather than problem fixing from the earlier system, developers also has to completely recognize and clearly prepared about the scope, the upside of the system and other materials so that the lately system can be reliable and usable in several aspect.

While developing a development, developer will acquire the upside and downside of the future system to make sure that the future develops system claims as the system and application that can be rely on and the users would be satisfy by using f it.

The future system will be easy to understand and use compare to other monitoring system which are in the market that have a complex installation steps as well as how t use it. It has a simple and user friendly interface where make the proposed system more useful.

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

Having a comprehensive review of the material in the literature review is the core support of strength in this chapter. As an approval of exploration when shaping the planned project, literature review also will act as assistance when completing the entire progress of the system and reaching the "project development" task in the particular methodology. At this point, developers will entirely elaborate the outcome of the review and all the matters of a fact that has been confirmed by the reliable source on the criteria of handling the bandwidth monitoring and monitoring system.

First of all, this review goes throw the network monitoring analysis, GSM network and the similar systems which are available in the market and would be categorized in domain Research. It then moves on to the language to use in the system, database, architecture and methodology which can be categorized in technical Research.

Domain Research

Network monitoring analysis

This part of investigation is aimed to understand the idea of the network monitor as well as the present grow of network monitoring improvement in all the organization.

What is network?

A group of workstations, servers, processors, network devices, peripherals, or several other devices linked to one another permitting for information or data to be shared and used too. A good instance of a network is the Internet, connecting billions of people entirely over the world together indeed.

Networks contain of the workstations, cabling, and other devices, for example hubs, switches as well as routers, which make up the network structure. Some devices, for example network interface cards, aid as the workstations link to the network. Devices such as routers and switches make available traffic control strategies for the network. All kinds of dissimilar technologies can essentially be employed to move data and information from one place to another, containing radio waves, wires and even microwave technology.

As conclude, Workstations are no longer just number crunching industry tools; they have become important in entertainment, communication or even education subjects. (Mitchell, 2013)

Why network computer?

There are certain compelling causes why people with more than a couple workstations would want to link those workstations into a network. What the network will essentially be used for will, obviously, vary depending on the requirements of the person or organization generating the network. Networks could be used for simple tasks, for instance sharing a printer or they can be used for other advanced applications or programs, for instance worldwide video conferencing or complex point of sale system.

All networks, whether giant or small, are normally shaped so that users on the network can share resources as well as communicate indeed. The list shows some of the reasons for networking computers:

File sharing: Networking workstations makes it so easy for the users on the network to share application documents.

Hardware sharing: Users can share devices for example printers, CD-ROM drives as well as hard drives.

Program sharing: Applications like spreadsheets or word processors can be run over the network.

User communication: Network permits users to take benefit of communication media such as newsgroups, electronic mail as well as video conferencing.

Network gaming: many games are available, which are supports multi users. (Boyer, 2013)

Why need network monitoring?

A network monitoring system is vital for the appropriate functioning of a home-based or business network. Network monitoring makes sure that the workstation system is working at top performance via continually checking entirely elements of the workstation network. Being a sub function of a network managing system, a network monitoring software will continually check slow or failing connections, maybe crashed servers, in the time that the servers are being overloaded or any other system tasks that might be go wrong.

A network monitoring software is set up and organized thru the System Administrator. The System Administrator sets the monitoring software to test all portion of the workstation system. This monitoring is completed by sending a test signal to every element of the network to make sure appropriate functionality.

The network monitoring system uses a programmed set of guidelines to estimate the functioning of the workstation network. These guidelines estimate network up time, connections, response time, stability and reliability of the network.

While of doing the performance tests if the network monitoring software program determines that any of the workstations are failing, will send an alarm. This alarm can be email sent to the administrator, an audio alert, a text message (SMS) sent to administrator or a grouping of any of these mentioned. If the monitoring program find out the failed element can cause a network failure can make active a backup system to keep the workstations up and running as well. (Blacharski, 2012)

For better understanding how a network monitoring works, try to give a usual system test. The program would send a testing email to an email server. The monitoring software will than estimate the period it takes to get to the server and the server's reply time in order to replying to the email. If the reply time is contained by the specified limits the system will pass that server and move on to the following server. If the reply time is not within appropriate limits, the monitoring system will monitor its protocols indeed. These protocols could contain warning and alerting the network administrator or switching the email server to a dissimilar system.

A networking monitoring system is particularly significant for businesses, whether it is small or huge. Usually, the larger the industry, the larger their workstation network system will be, and the larger the essential for a monitoring system indeed. Having an effective system in place to ensure the network is working correctly, will make sure their business has no downtime and no loss of information or data.

Advantages of network monitoring

Network Monitoring is necessary for every companies or businesses of any size. The proper monitoring tools not only make sure that you are informed when outages happen, but also growths network efficiency via tracking bandwidth as well as resource consumption.

Network monitoring offers the following core advantages:

Reduced inefficiency as well as downtime.

No more undetected system failures.

Increases the total availability of the network via changing and rapidly detecting and fixing network problems alerts are received before a fault happens. (Eglin, 2009)

Disadvantages of network monitoring

Although network monitoring makes for ensuring that the network is working properly but there is some disadvantages that come with networking tools which are that the amount of information and data given by the system to you will not be enough for you and make you satisfy to fix every problem and failure in the network and the system that you use to retrieve r save and recover of the data and information may be extremely working slow.

Why Should You Monitor the Traffic on Your Network?

You can get info about the health of network.

If a server stops replying or responding or a part of your network disconnected, the network monitor would come up a message so you can reply right away. However these tools go afar reactive alerts about things that are previously broken. They can offer warnings about overloaded servers, network go slows and other signs of suffering so you can address problems earlier.

Well understanding of long-term trends.

Network monitoring tools make graphs as well as reports in case of network performance over time. How fast is the request for bandwidth growing? If the average of daily Internet use has grown up to 1 megabits per second over the past five months, can get a good sense of how much you will require two years from now and budget so and also plan well for the replacement of servers, routers and switches since network monitors keep figures associated to performance of these devices.

By monitoring network traffic, you can:

Avoid bandwidth as well as server performance bottlenecks

Find out which applications use up your bandwidth

Decrease costs via buying bandwidth as well as hardware according to actual load

Simply troubleshoot network problems (Cecil, 2010)

Bandwidth

Bandwidths in computer networking speak of the data rate supported with the network interface or connection. One most usually expresses bandwidth in terms of bits per second (bps). Bandwidth shows the capacity of the network connection. Greater of capacity, brings greater performance. Bandwidth monitoring is including in the network monitoring. Bandwidth Monitor tracks traffic of entirely network connections and also shows real time download and upload speeds rate in graphical as well as numerical forms indeed. (Roslan, 2011)

Bandwidth Management

Bandwidth management is the method of evaluating and monitoring the communications such as traffic or packets on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would consequence in network bottleneck and poor performance or failure of the network. Bandwidth management is evaluated in Bytes per second (Bps) or bits per second (bps).

There are a few related approaches to managing and controlling bandwidth.

You can slow down the greedy, bandwidth-hungry programs.

You can prioritize the important, high priority and importance traffic on your network

You can improve the traffic on your network to growth efficiency and avoid redundant transmissions. (Prasad, et al., 2003)

Why Should You Manage and control Your Bandwidth?

Bandwidth manages and Control permits you to well manage the bandwidth consumption on your network, containing monitoring and visualizing the use of your network at a fine grained level. The important reasons for manage the bandwidth is:

Bandwidth equals money.

Bandwidth costs lots of money in month, and whatever you can do to lower your bandwidth consumption will save you budget in the long time.

Improved Internet experience.

Bandwidth management can make the modification between a network that is perceived as unresponsive and one that looks fast and also reliable

GSM network

According to (Gunnar Heine, 2003), each GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) network can be split up into the network switching subsystem (NSS) and the base station subsystem (BSS), along with the mobile station. Several characteristics of GSM are well-defined in the case of the mobile device:

The cellular network configuration with relatively small cell sizes permits low transmission energy consumption on the mobile station side, which is why the mobile station battery could be kept light and small.

The Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying modulation (GMSK) used in GSM allows the use of low cost power amplifiers; this is chiefly a simple and easy modulation process. Manufacturing costs should too be consequently low.

The original GSM standard did not make available for GSM mobile stations to being capable of transmit as well as receive simultaneously indeed. Duplex operation was not visualized. Therefore, a duplexer on the interface among antenna and transmitting / receiving path was not essential. This issue also decreases the difficulty and costs of a GSM mobile station.

As opposed to further network elements in the NSS and BSS, detailed necessity, for instance, of the man machine interface (MMI), were well-defined for the mobile station.

The clear explanation of obligatory and optional features of the GSM mobile station with regard to performance permits for several of test cases. These are particularly well-defined for mobile stations in the GSM standards. Each GSM mobile station should conform to these test cases before it is acceptable to be retailed. On first glance, this restriction might be appear a hindrance, but it proves to be most beneficial in the long run since it make sure customer confidence and decreases significantly the amount of costly recall campaigns.

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SERVICES

Services

Explanation

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send e-mail among servers. SMTP is an Internet's standard host-to-host mail transport protocol that typically travels over TCPAP port 25, and is used to send messages, but not receive them. Therefore we required to identify the POP or IMAP server as well as the SMTP server when configure the e-mail application.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

The protocol for exchanging files over the Internet. FTP workings in the similar way as HTTP for transferring Web pages from a server to a user's browser and SMTP for transferring electronic mail across the Internet in that, like these technologies, FTP uses the Internet's TCPIIP protocols to allow data transfer. FTP is most usually used to download a file from a server by the Internet or to upload a file to a server (e.g., uploading a Web page file to a server).

Relevant research and similar systems

(Wang, 2009)States that network monitoring mean different things to different people. In their example they have a network administrator who monitors the network activity and the other is a high end computing workstation which generates graphical views of network traffic. So both of them work together with the help of different tools and software to gather and analyze information, thereby stating that network management is a set of tools which helps administrators. The system will be working towards using a set of tools which would monitor our network and send a SMS to the administrator in the event of network not meeting the criterions set by us. These will be discussed later on in detail.

Nagios

Nagios calls themself an "open source host, service and network monitoring program". In actuality, however, it is extra of a monitoring framework, in that it permits an administrator to rapidly fold the one-liners they use to collect info right into the configuration. Add to this the several plug-in accessible, and you can simply integrate Nagios by monitoring tools. (Shuhaim, 2011)

Mainly, though, you required to get your head around the technique that Nagios approaches configuration generally, so we will start there with a reasonably easy configuration. To get something useful out of Nagios, there are four things, at least, that must be configured. Namely hosts, host groups, services as well as contacts.

The configuring of Nagios is very easy. You have hosts, on which apparently run services. Hosts making the similar services can be gathered together into host groups for simple summarization in the web front end indeed. As well, your organization maybe has contacts for the dissimilar services. If there is more than one contact for a particular service, you can put these contacts together under an alias or contact set. When a machine Nagios monitors goes down or loses a service it is been running, Nagios can be configured to inform the correct contact or set for that host or service as well. (Roslan, 2011)

Below is the figure of nagios network monitoring:

Nagios run and works by checking and monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts as well as services you identify using external "plugins" which return status data to Nagios. When problems happen Nagios will alerts the administrator by email, instant message, SMS. Present status info, historical logs and reports can altogether be accessed by a web browser. (Ahmed, 2010)

Some of the several features of Nagios contain:

1. Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.).

2. Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.).

3. Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks.

4. Parallelized service checks. (Nagios Enterprises, 2013)

Zabbix

Zabbix is enterprise class open source software for monitoring of networks. It is planned to monitor, control and track the status of several network services.

It uses Oracle or IBM DB2 data base management systems to store data and the information’s about the computers. Its backend is written in C language and the web frontend is written in PHP.

Zabbix offers some monitoring options which are:

Simple checks can confirm the accessibility and responsiveness of standard services for instance SMTP or HTTP without set up any software on the monitored host.

A Zabbix could be set up on UNIX as well as Windows hosts to monitor statistics for instance CPU load, network utilization, disk space.

As an alternative to setting up an agent on hosts, Zabbix contains support for monitoring by SNMP, TCP, in addition to over IPMI, telnet and using custom parameters. Zabbix supports a range of real time notification mechanisms, and sending any kind of alarms in case of network failure which can be email to the administrator. (Olups, 2010)

Some features of this software is:

Agent-less monitoring

JMX monitoring

Web monitoring

Secure user authentication

Flexible user permissions

Flexible e-mail notification on predefined events

Ganglia

Ganglia can be defined as is an accessible distributed monitoring system for great performance computing systems for instance clusters (A group of nodes) and Grids (A group of clusters). It is created on a hierarchical design targeted at groups of clusters. It depend on a multicast based listen protocol to monitor state contained by clusters as well as uses a tree of point to point networks between representative cluster nodes to combine clusters and combined their state.

It leverages commonly used technologies for instance Extensible Markup Language (XML) for data representation, extreme data rate (XDR) for compact and round-robin database tool (RRD) tool for data storage as well as visualization.

It uses sensibly engineered data structures and processes to achieve very low per-node overheads and great concurrency indeed. The implementation would be robust and has been ported to an wide set of operating systems (OS) and processor architectures, and is presently in use on over 400 clusters whole over the world. (Massie, 2004)

Ganglia Monitoring Daemon (Gmond) has four chief responsibilities which including:

Monitor modifications in host state.

Announce relevant changes with SMS or email to the administrator.

Listen to the state of all other ganglia nodes by a unicast or multicast channel.

Response requirements for an XML description of the cluster state.

The high level of performance and great usability of this monitoring system makes it more useful in case of huge enterprises with lots of end stations and definitely would aid administrator to fix the failure of the network before serious problem happen.