Shannon Capacity Analysis Using Wireshark TCP Throughput Under Varying Traffic Loads
Shannon Capacity Analysis Using Wireshark TCP Throughput 1. Introduction Modern communication networks operate within hard theoretical boundaries defined by Claude Shannon's channel capacity theorem. Originally formulated in 1948, Shannon's theorem establishes the maximum rate at which information can be reliably transmitted over a noisy channel. For any real-world network, understanding the gap between this theoretical maximum and observed throughput is critical for diagnosing bottlenecks, optimising configurations, and planning capacity. This experiment leverages Wireshark 's TCP Stream Graph feature to visually measure TCP throughput across four distinct traffic intensity levels, then compares the resulting slope-based throughput values against the Shannon capacity ceiling of approximately 120 Mbps computed for the test environment. Traffic was generated using a single curl.exe command per level — downloading files of increasing size (10 ...