Web Conferencing Traffic - An Analysis using DimDim as Example

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Ethernet traffic in web conferencing using DimDim, revealing that hosts generate heavy, long-range dependent, and heavily-tailed traffic, with distinct patterns across different activities.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed Ethernet traffic characterization of web conferencing systems, highlighting traffic patterns and their implications for network management.

Findings

Hosts generate large, heavy-tailed traffic

Traffic exhibits long-range dependence

Different activities have distinct traffic characteristics

Abstract

In this paper, we present an evaluation of the Ethernet traffic for host and attendees of the popular opensource web conferencing system DimDim. While traditional Internet-centric approaches such as the MBONE have been used over the past decades, current trends for web-based conference systems make exclusive use of application-layer multicast. To allow for network dimensioning and QoS provisioning, an understanding of the underlying traffic characteristics is required. We find in our exemplary evaluations that the host of a web conference session produces a large amount of Ethernet traffic, largely due to the required control of the conference session, that is heavily-tailed distributed and exhibits additionally long-range dependence. For different groups of activities within a web conference session, we find distinctive characteristics of the generated traffic.