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| 1.1 |  | Overview of a Campus Network |
| 1.1.3 |  | Traditional 80/20 rule of network traffic |

Ideally, end users with common interests or work patterns are placed in the same logical network as the servers they access most. Most of the traffic within these logical networks is contained on the local LAN segment. This simple task effectively minimizes the load on the network backbone.

As shown in Figure , the 80/20 rule states that in a properly designed network, 80 percent of the traffic on a given network segment is local. No more than 20 percent of the network traffic should move across the backbone of the network. Backbone congestion is an indication that traffic patterns are not meeting the 80/20 rule. In this case, rather than adding switches or replacing hubs with switches, network administrators can improve network performance by doing one of the following:

- Moving resources such as applications, software programs, and files from one server to another to contain traffic locally within a workgroup.
- Moving users logically, if not physically, so that the workgroups more closely reflect the actual traffic patterns.
- Adding servers so that users can access them locally without having to cross the backbone.