Multimedia Conferencing on Packet Switched Networks: Testing and Evaluation

This paper briefly reports on the results of some testing activities performed at IASI on the efficiency of multimedia conferencing on both local and wide-area packet switched networks. The aim of the testing was to study under which hypothesis it was possible to obtain acceptable - in terms of rate of information exchanged - multimedia conferencing sessions. A specific goal was to verify the possibility of obtaining an acceptable quality by using widely available, cheap resources. The tests performed have been carried out on an Ethernet LAN, connected to Internet by a 64Kbps link, using TCP/IP with multicast extension as transport protocol, in order to avoid IP datagrams multiplication when a multimedia conference involves more than two participants