  In this paper, we present an evaluation of the Ethernet traffic for host and
attendees of the popular opensource web conferencing system DimDim. While
traditional Internet-centric approaches such as the MBONE have been used over
the past decades, current trends for web-based conference systems make
exclusive use of application-layer multicast. To allow for network dimensioning
and QoS provisioning, an understanding of the underlying traffic
characteristics is required. We find in our exemplary evaluations that the host
of a web conference session produces a large amount of Ethernet traffic,
largely due to the required control of the conference session, that is
heavily-tailed distributed and exhibits additionally long-range dependence. For
different groups of activities within a web conference session, we find
distinctive characteristics of the generated traffic.
