An empirical study of real audio traffic

Abstract
The delivery of multimedia content is a facet of Internet traf- fic that is rapidly growing in importance. The new generation of World Wide Web sites are relying heavily on extensive multi- media content such as graphics, sound, music and video to at- tract and retain visitors. While there have been extensive stud- ies on the growth and effects of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic used on the Web, little or no work has been per- formed 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 pro- gram. We found protocol distributions that show a bias towards non-TCP friendly protocols. In addition, we observed consisten- cies 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 connec- tions.

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