The Influence of Workload Characterization in the Performance Analysis of Tele-collaboration Environments

The Telecollaboration (TC) business system, an important class of emerging applications that is spawning new challenges to achieving the desired levels of performance. One important implication in identifying and characterizing the properties of TC system implementations is that performance evaluation should no longer be isolated and viewed as a separate analytic activity. Instead, we require a physical and logical understanding of the complex quality issues that affect overall performance of applications, systems and network infrastructures. As one of the natural artifacts of this practice, a workload model will be developed to characterize a TC system. We demonstrate how such an analysis may result in characterization of workload behavior, and that in turn will lead to definition of efficient analytical model parameters, network invariants and use of relevant quality metrics. The study of underlying issues of Telecollaboration Quality of Service (TQoS) within the context of TC could have positive impacts on performance analysis and traffic control, if the analytical modeling used remains consistent and effective in describing the Web-based environments.