Multimedia conferencing on packet switched networks: testing and evaluation

This paper briefly reports 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 testing aimed at studying under which hypothesis it is possible to obtain acceptable, in terms of rate of information exchanged, multimedia conferencing sessions. Particular interest has been given to verifying 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 its multicast extension as transport protocol in order to avoid IP datagrams multiplication when a multimedia conference involves more than two participants.