Internet Bandwidth Usage Monitor (IBUM)

Abstract

Today in many organizations the internet bandwidth is considered as one of the resources which are exceedingly misused by the organizational employees. Studies around the world have shown that the misuse of the organizational internet bandwidth has been growing at an alarming rate over the past decade. As a result many organizations have been forced to take action to restrict or block the usage of their employees. If we talk about the current situation in the majority of the organizations have shown that the network administrators have tried to address this issue by adding various firewall policies to block or restrict such misuse. Such policies control the usage by limiting access to certain websites and in turn reducing the unwanted employee internet usage. However still most network administrators struggle to identify what should and should not be limited. Identifying usage patterns and narrowing down important details such as who consumes most of the bandwidth and when it is being consumed and on which sites or applications is very important. When considering the objective of the project it was identified that the best means to address this issue was to develop a software application which allows network administrator to monitor the internet bandwidth utilization among the organization’s employees and easily decide what rules or policies are to be placed in order to block or restrict any misuse.