Journal of Information Engineering and Applications www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5782 (print) ISSN 2225-0506 (online) Vol.5, No.1, 2015 13 Performance Analysis of NICs and Its Interactivity with Internet Services Michael F.Adaramola 1* Michael.A.K.Adelabu 2 1.School of Engineering, Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu, P.M.B. 21,606, Ikeja. Lagos. Nigeria 2. Faculty of Engineering, University of Lagos, Akoka, Yaba, Lagos. Nigeria *Email: mfadaramola@yahoo.com Abstract This paper analyses the problem of slow data or video streaming on the World Wide Web internet through the network interface cards (NICs). The service of the entire network and internet connectivity largely rest on the installed Network Interface Cards (NICs). The performance of the various NICs such as 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1,000Mbps and 10,000Mbps were examined using different message data sizes on the network. Also, the paper extensively discusses the performance of 10Gbps Ethernet card such as: data transmission time and throughput. The fact remained that the major backbone of the Internet network is the transmission control protocol (TCP) which is designed for reliable sending of data over the internet. The TCP as the protocol of the NIC is used for browsing web and downloading or uploading files. Additionally, the paper also examines the TCP feedback mechanism that is able to detect loss packets and retransmit them. Also, the TCP is able to dynamically adapt its packet sending rate to the network conditions in order to achieve the highest possible throughput. However, this paper proposes the use of the 10Gbps Ethernet card for the Internet Servers and Workstations for effective and fast internet access in all public networks. Keywords: Ethernet Card, Transmission Control Protocol, Data transmission time, throughput. 1. Introduction A network interface card sometimes called a network adapter or network card or simply NIC, is the physical interface between a computer, or other device and a local area network, practically, a network interface card connects your computer to the LAN cabling. NICs come in various forms: some are built in to the computer’s motherboard: others are in the form of an expansion card that plays into your computer’s motherboard: some are PC cards; and still others can attach to the computer’s USB port. Additional hardware specifications define whether a NIC will be used with co-axial cable twisted pair, fiber optic or even wireless. Also, these cards are available at a designated data transmission rate such as 10Mbps, 16Mbps, 100Mbps, and 1Gbps and so on. The network interface card is a physical connectivity and assembles it into an acceptable format from transmission across a network medium. Likewise, the NIC accepts information from the network medium and “translates” that information into a format the computer can understand. Many data applications over asymmetric networks such as web browsing or file transfer are built on TCP/IP, the widely used Internet data transfer protocol (Wright, 1995) When sending data such as file from a computer to another computer through a LAN, it is fairly simple process. If you are using e-mail, you click on send. If you are accessing a file transfer protocol (FTP) or hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) server, you click upload. If you simply want to save a file on another computer such as a server on the LAN, you click File save, and then specify a filename and location on the other system (Ogletree, 2006) However, there is a lot technology going on within the computer to help you convert your file medium. The data must exit the computer through the network interface card, but before it can do so, the NIC segments your data transmission into chunks called FRAMES, that the physical network can manage. In other words, an entire file would be broken into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces and transmitted as frames as the file is being sent from your computer to another location across the LAN. Each frame includes not only a portion of the data being sent, but also the address information of both the sending and the receiving network cards. Each frame needs to have this source and destination address information so that the data can find its intended destination as well as known were it originated. This address information is sometimes called the physical address of the network interface card, or simply the hardware address, because it is encrypted into a chip on the NIC. But this address is associated with the data link layer of the OSI model discussed in Section 3, so we call the address of each network interface card a data link layer address. Every NIC has a unique, 48-bit address known as a media access control, (MAC) address. The MAC- address is comprised of a 24-bit Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) that is always assigned by the IEEC for a fee to the manufacturer, plus a manufacturer generated 24-bit code that is concatenated or appended to the OUI. The address is represented as a series of six, eight-bit represented such as AF: 00: CE: 3A:8B:0C. MAC addresses are encoded, into one of the integrated circuits on each NIC so that every computing device on a LAN can be uniquely identified. When devices generated requests or send information the LAN, the MAC address of both the sending and destination computers is added to each packet of information that is placed