Behavior of codecs for multicast video traffic using WAN test bed

In recent years there has been an exponential increase in the growth in multimedia applications, and in particular in video applications. Understanding the behavior of the video traffic and the requirements for the network helps network administrators to improve the traffic. In this work, a quantitative analysis is performed by experimentation, in order to evaluate the behavior and impact of video traffic on WAN networks. We propose a WAN test bed composed by a video traffic server and several client stations. This article introduces a scenario that allows to inject multicast video traffic, compressed with several codecs. From capturing video traffic, we identified several interesting performance metrics, such as multicast throughput, interframe space and frame size distributions, and the number of frames. We include detailed contributions on the impact produced by several factors, such as the configuration of the resolution of the video, the video class, the codec used for the compression, and the use of multicast traffic when there are restrictions on the bandwidth, as in a corporate real WAN link of some few Mbps. This study facilitates the comparison of the results with those obtained from analytical studies and modelling for different contexts.