Bandwidth experiments of Flash Media Server

Description

This report focuses on the bandwidth experiments of Flash Media Server which are the crucial feature of any video applications. I conducted the experiments using Adobe Flash Media Development Server free edition. Its license limit allows only up to 10 simultaneous connections.

Example

I experimented with bandwidth of Flash Media Server 3 using deliverable 2 (video chat application). In this example experiment, there is one publisher which publishes the web cam data to the server and the server streams this webcam data to nine subscribers. At a time the server can support 10 simultaneous users.

I experimented with 10 simultaneous connections in local system. I got a graph like this.

Figure: Bandwidth of 10 simultaneous connections in local system.

The first graph shows the total active connections which is 10 in this experiment. The second graph shows the bandwidth output. Green line is the input bandwidth and blue and dark blue lines show the output bandwidth and total bandwidth. The graph clearly shows that as the number of connections increases, bandwidth also increases. The spikes in the graph show that traffic is spontaneous rather than a smooth flow. The server sends data to the clients between intervals.

I experimented with 10 simultaneous connections on the same server using two machines connected through local area network (LAN).I got a graph like this.

Figure: Bandwidth of 10 simultaneous connections through local area network (LAN).

The above graph shows that connection through LAN causes more congestion. Also the bytes of data per second are less compared to the connection in local system. So the data loss is more in this case. The picture quality also degraded.

From these experiments, I concluded that LAN connection can cause more congestion and for that reason the data transfer is less compared to connection within the local system.