<title>Traffic analysis on multimedia data services</title>

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the advantages of having transactional value added services (i.e. interactive multimedia ones) instead of solely providing information on electronic supports (i.e. CD-ROMs). Investment on network resources provision, or even on adding infrastructure to existing networks, seems to be the most cost-effective solution for the establishment of this kind of services. Support for multimedia data services requires a full characterization of both the forward and return channels (usually highly asymmetric) for one or several users, so that proper resources can be allocated or efficient new infrastructures can be designed. This paper firstly describes a fully interactive and general purpose multimedia client/server application (a currently working one), that provides to the user a common interface to remotely access heterogenous databases. Secondly, it presents the test architecture and configuration established to obtain a representative number of traffic measures that a single instance of this multimedia application generates over a TCP network. Data is then analyzed to extract the QoS traffic parameters that will define network capabilities for both the forward and return communication channels, first for a single user, and then to optimize a multi-user environment. Next, a methodology for the accurate characterization of the multi-user situation is presented. Finally, arguments for extrapolation of the results to most applications currently running over Internet, are discussed.