Modern society is rapidly evolving into an information society. Today's technologies that allow the transformation, communication, and storage of information have produced fundamental changes in the manner in which businesses are conducted.

This thesis research consists of the analysis of the Local Area Network (LAN) with an emphasis on performance. The LAN in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland at College Park is investigated for the purpose of this research. A performance analysis is carried out for the LAN environment in the Lefrak Hall.. Workstation speed, server speed, server memory, and the number of workstations on LAN are taken as four important system parameters and a 24 full factorial design is performed on the LAN in the Lefrak Hall. The responding time during a 19 MB file transmission is defined as the LAN operation efficiency. An empirical model is established to describe the effects of those four system parameters on the communication between the server and the workstation.

Significant findings, which lead to the recommendations for improving the performance of the LAN at the present time and within the current working environment, are: 1) Server memory is not a key factor to improve the communication efficiency.

2) The other three systems parameters have significant effects with the workstation speed being most important.

3) The two-factor interaction between workstation speed and server speed indicates that the gain from increasing either workstation or server speed will be double-counted in improving the communication efficiency.

With such findings, it is recommended that each department within the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences should upgrade existing workstations to higher speed. Also, instead of adding extra memory to the file server, the speed of the file server (processing power) should be increased. It is also recommended that new network technology such as switching hubs be used to increase the bandwidth of the network for further improving network efficiency.