Communication requirements and network evaluation within electronic meeting system environments

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Abstract

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. Our 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. We 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.

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  • Cited by (2)

    1

    Alan Dennis is a doctoral candidate in Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. He received a Bachelor of Computer Science from Acadia University and an MBA from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and was a 1987 winner of the AACSB National Doctoral Fellowship. Mr. Dennis has published articles in MIS Quarterly, Information and Management, Computers & Graphics, and DataBase. His current research interests include electronic meeting systems and management graphics.

    We would like to acknowledge the research assistance provided by Frank DiMaggio, Shiow-Jiuan Huang, Sandhya Sathe, and Jane Stodola, and the helpful comments of Joey George and Mark Pendergast on an earlier draft of this paper.

    2

    Tom Abens is a Computer Applications Specialists for the University of Arizona. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Economics (Magna Cum Laude) from Northern Illinois University, and is enrolled part time in the Master of Science in Management Information Systems program. Mr. Abens has held various positions in the financial and aerospace industries, and is currently developing database systems to more efficiently manage the University's budgeting process.

    3

    Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr. is Head of the Department of Management of Management Information Systems and is a Professor of MIS and Computer Science at the University of Arizona. He received a PhD from Case Institute of Technology in systems engineering and operations research. He was an Associated Professor of Computer Science and Industrial Administration at Purdue University. Dr. Nunamaker joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1974 to develop the MIS program. He has authored numerous papers on electronic meeting systems, the automation of software construction, performance evaluation of computer systems, decision support systems for systems analysis and design, and has lectured throughout Europe, Russia, Asia, and South America. Dr. Nunamaker is Chairman of the ACM Curriculum Committee on Information Systems.

    4

    Sudha Ram is currently an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1985. Dr. Ram has published in journals such as Communications of the ACM, Information Systems, Information Science, and Journal of Systems and Software. Her research interests are in the areas of distributed database and knowledge based systems, semantic modeling, automated tools for database design, and application of knowledge based systems in business. Her research in these areas has been funded by IBM, US Army, The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Marketing Science Institute. In configuring the networks, the default parameters were used for Novell Netware. For IBM PC LAN, parameters were set to use 10K network buffers at both the server and user workstations, with four buffers on the server. Time slicing on the server was set as recommended for a dedicated server [14, p. 12–17]. One megabyte was used for caching.

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