The dissertation addresses the communication issues of interconnecting the different government sectors LANs, and access to the global Internet. Network capacities are being purposely overengineered in today's commercial Internet. Any network provider, be it a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Information Technology Service department at government sector, company or university site, will design network bandwidth resources in such a way that there will be virtually no data loss, even during the worst possible network utilization scenario. Thus, the service delivered by today's end-to-end wide area Internet would be perfect if it wasn't for the inter-domain connections, such as Internet access link to the ISP, or peering points between ISPs. The thesis studies the performance of the network in Eritrea, displaying the problems of Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WAN) and suggesting initial solutions and investigating the performance of (WAN) through the measured traffic analysis between Asmara LAN and Massawa LAN, using queuing theory system (M/M/1 and M/M/2) solution. The dissertation also uses OPNET IT Guru simulation software program ·to study the performance of LAN and WLAN in Eritrea. The items studied include traffic, collision, packet loss, and queue delay. Finally in order to follow the current trends, we study the performance ofVOIP links in Eritrean WANs environment, with a focus on five different link capacities: 28 kbps, 33 kbps, 64 kbps, and 128 kbps for voice and 256/512 kbps for voice and data. Using the R value as a measure of mean opinion score (MOS), we determine that the 33 kbps link would be adequate for Eritrean WANs.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2006.