Detection of Broadcast Storms in Local Area Networks

Abstract

Broadcast storms represent events in the local area network (LAN) which is the result of excessive amounts of packet retransmissions by network switches which drastically reduce network performance and even overload network infrastructure which can result in that network becoming inoperational. Broadcast storms originate from broadcast and multicast packets which are targeted for all or groups of stations in LAN. Since these packets are addressed to multiple destinations, they are usually forwarded by network switches on multiple ports to reach all targeted destinations. This can become a serious problem in institutional LANs in which broadcast storms can create a temporary or permanent overload of the entire network infrastructure. This is most notably observed during the videoconferencing calls which could cause packet loss or connection interruptions. In this paper, we analyzed the influence of broadcast storms on network performance in institutional LAN and proposed a machine learning algorithm for the detection of broadcast storms based on the network traffic data collected by the Packet Capture (PCAP) Wireshark software.