An experimental study of video traffic on an Ethernet local area network

Video applications and multimedia services will likely be the largest consumers of bandwidth on future high speed networks, such as B-ISDN/ATM. This paper presents an empirical study of a continuous bit rate video application (VideoPix) on an existing (low speed) 10 Mbps Ethernet local area network. The performance of the application is found to be poor in terms of the quality (i.e., frame rate) of the video delivered to clients of the video server. However, a detailed analysis of the network traffic produced by the application shows that the network itself is not the performance bottleneck. Rather, the performance is limited by display technology, the X window system, and TCP/IP. If these performance limits could be overcome, a single uncompressed video application would easily consume all the available bandwidth on an Ethernet local area network