ABSTRACT
This research studied the Internet Protocol traffic on the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria network in order to develop a strategic Bandwidth Management model. This work used a packet sniffer on the network for the investigation of different types of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic in order to device a bandwidth management strategy that will be based on the characteristics of the different types of protocols, their usage and the bandwidth consumed by each of these protocols. It was found that more than 75% of the total IP traffic on the university network are HTTP traffic while about 19% of the traffic were termed "other IP protocol". A closer look at the constituents of the HTTP traffic revealed that internet mail sites like Yahoo, Google, MNS etc constitute not less that 50 % of the total HTTP traffic while online socialising sites like YouTube, Facebook etc also constitute a very significant amount of traffic on the network, other sites are Microsoft and various antivirus software sites . Based on the analysis of the data collected, it is suggested that access to less relevant sites to academic and research activities be restricted to off peak period (5pm -9am).It is also suggested that FTP server and Microsoft update servers be deployed on the network to ensure that software download and updates are restricted to local traffic. The official email for the University should be accessed only during working hours while access to all internet free mail sites are denied.