3.10 Environment-Specific Thresholds and Limits

General thresholds and limits give us some common estimates for low-and high-performance requirements for our network. They are useful when there is a lack of information about users, applications, and devices for the network, but often there is information about what the performance thresholds should be. With this information, we can develop thresholds and limits specific to that network.

Environment-specific thresholds and limits are an acknowledgment that each network is unique and that the requirements of users, applications, and devices are specific to the environment in which they operate. The environment takes into account concepts such as the area of work that they are doing or what their objectives are (e.g., what motivates them). Thus, an academic research environment differs drastically from a retail (sales) environment, which will differ from a manufacturing environment, and so on. The thresholds that distinguish between low and high performance will be unique to each environment.

Developing environment-specific thresholds recognizes that each environment is unique and that what may be considered high performance for one environment may be low performance for another. Recognizing the uniqueness of each environment (and thus network) that you work in is a good habit to develop, especially if you are involved with many different networks.

As with general thresholds, the reason for developing environment-specific thresholds is to determine which applications have high-performance requirements. We have spent a lot of time on this, but why is it so important? For each network project that we work...