Performance evaluation of a Java-based networking Application Programming Interface (API)

Over the last few years, we have witnessed the emergence of many network-based multimedia applications, particularly those rich in audio, video, and images. Access to network services has become an integral component of these applications. In this paper, we present a Java-based networking Application Programming Interface (API), and compare the performance of our Java-based API with Microsoft Winsock 2 API over different protocols namely, TCP/IP, UDP/IP and native Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). From the results obtained, we observe that the Java layer increases the overall user-to-user latency by about 120 microseconds compared to native Winsock 2 over ATM local area networks. We also found that jitter performance for continuous media applications, such as those involving digital video is highly non-deterministic. We obtained large variations in video jitter over Java, with maximum jitter in the range 6 to 12 milliseconds.  2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.