Traffic Analysis and Bandwidth Testing

[<adisegna () siscocorp com>]

        Does anyone know of a good whitepaper on the subject of software
traffic analysis and bandwidth testing?  I have been tasked with
checking the security/encryption of some software as it traverses the
network and to see how much bandwidth it uses. This application enters
information into a backend database and information is needed on the
amount of kilobytes/megabytes used in a session. I need some guidelines
to follow. What type of variables should be used? Idle time, connection
length, options selected when data is sent, type of transactions, start
to finish times, etc... I was thinking of using a protocol analyzer like
Ethereal for the security portion. I know Ethereal will show the number
of bytes captured, however, addition of each packet captured may be a
little time consuming... Also I would prefer to use open source software
for this project.

Thanks 

AD