At a local level it is not anticipated that the additional network load generated by FMD traffic will cause any significant impact to existing HSCN/N3 connections. The amount of network traffic generated by FMD transactions is very small so there should be no noticeable degradation of performance of other applications,or a requirement to increase the capacity of the existing connection. Current applications should, where required, by protected during times of network congestion, through Quality of Service (QoS) which guarantees a minimum amount of bandwidth to an application or group of applications. Clearly, where a network link is currently experiencing congestion regularly and consistently, the addition of any additional load may have a negative impact on overall performance. The management and maintenance of traffic level on existing connections to HSCN/N3 is the responsibility of the local organisation.
Rough guide to data transfer times
The table is a very rough guide in order to further illustrate to amount of network traffic that FMD transactions are likely to generate, and the impact on network connections of varying sizes. It is important to note that the data below is for guidance purposes only and does not represent a ‘real-world’ scenario given that FMD transactions will be spread out across a day rather than transmitted altogether in a single data file.
This table gives an idea of the speed at which a network link of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 Mbps could transfer the total amount of data generated in one day FMD transactions, based on the number of transactions per day.The calculations above take into consideration network overhead (TCP/IP header size and Ethernet framing) but assume no other application traffic on the network.
It is fair to estimate that for a network link that is not continuously congested,the additional traffic load generated by FMD transactions should not require an immediate increase in capacity. However, the local organisation should have in place processes to highlight any increases in demand for network bandwidth,and activities to monitor and plan for future growth. It is difficult to estimate the additional bandwidth required to support the extra network traffic generated by the FMD transactions without knowledge of historic and recent traffic patterns and utilisation of the current network connection, as well as future capacity requirements.