Communication requirements and network evaluation within electronic meeting system environments

One of the key issues in the design and implementation of Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) is the identification of appropriate support for computer communications. Lack of adequate communication support can create a bottleneck in the use of EMS. The present objective is to identify the communication needs of several different EMS environments and to discuss an approach that can be used to evaluate the required communication support. The authors then use this approach to benchmark the performance of two Local Area Network (LAN) operating systems (IBM LAN program and Novell Netware) and three network servers (IBM PS/2 models 50, 60 and 80) in one EMS environment. While network operating systems have received comparatively less attention in LAN evaluation and design, fully 75% of the response time in some configurations was due solely to the network operating system. The Novell Netware software running on the IBM PS/2 model 50 server provided at least as great speed at lower cost than any other configuration tested. For the small files common to one style of EMS environment (i.e. under 2.5K), response time was not affected by the size of the file but rather was determined by the fixed overhead imposed by the network operating system.