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An Empirical Study of Real Audio Traffic

Art Mena and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

The delivery of multimedia content is a facet of Internet traffic that is rapidly growing in importance. The new generation of World Wide Web sites are relying heavily on extensive multimedia content such as graphics, sound, music and video to attract and retain visitors. While there have been extensive studies on the growth and effects of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic used on the Web, little or no work has been performed in analyzing streaming multimedia traffic. We present the results of a brief study to examine the traffic emanating from a popular Internet audio service using the RealAudio program. We found protocol distributions that show a bias towards non-TCP friendly protocols. In addition, we observed consistencies in audio traffic packet sizes and data rate patterns may be useful as a tool for identifying audio data flows. Our results show that audio flows exhibit significant consistency in data rates and are considerably more persistent than HTTP connections.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, gzip'ed postscript, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Mena00a: Art Mena and John Heidemann. An Empirical Study of Real Audio Traffic. In Proceedings of the IEEE Infocom, p. 101-110. Tel-Aviv, Israel, IEEE. March, 2000. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mena00a.html>.

@inproceedings{Mena00a,
	author = "Art Mena and John Heidemann",
	title = "An Empirical Study of Real Audio Traffic",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the  {IEEE} Infocom",
	year = "2000",
	publisher = "{IEEE}",
	address = "Tel-Aviv, Israel",
	month = "March",
	pages = "101--110",
	keywords = "real audio, traffic studies",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mena00a.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mena00a.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Mena00a.pdf",
	copyrightholder = "{IEEE}",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2000 by IEEE. Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source. Libraries are permitted to photocopy beyond the limit of US copyright law, for private use of patrons, those articles in this volume that carry a code at the bottom of the first page, provided that the per-copy fee indicated in the code is paid through the Copyright Clearance Center, 27 Congress Street, Salem, MA 01970. For other copying, reprint, or republication permission, write to IEEE Copyrights Manager, IEEE Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, PO Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331.