Performance Evaluation of OSPF and EIGRP Routing Protocols for Video Streaming over Next Generation Networks

Abstract

The challenge in performance of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) is a growing concern. Bandwidth limitation for multimedia applications in NGNs such as voice and video telephony along with the increasing number of applications on the Internet, service classification and efficient resource management have all become quite challenging tasks. In order to improve the service quality in video streaming especially, there has to be efficient resource and traffic management, and using routing protocols is one way in which this can be done. We designed three network models that are configured with OSPF, EIGRP and one with both OPSF and EIGRP routing protocols, and then used the QoS parameters of throughput, packet loss, convergence time, mean latency and end-to-end delay as our metrics to evaluate the performance of OSPF and EIGRP. Our main source of network traffic was a typical video conferencing application. The results obtained during our experiments indicate that combining both EIGRP and OSPF is more reliable in providing Quality of Service than OSPF routing protocol when the main traffic used in the network is video, but when dealing with a standalone real time application network, EIGRP is better than OSPF.