Comparative study of the FireWire™ IEEE-1394 protocol with the Universal Serial Bus and Ethernet

This paper presents results of study of the IEEE 1394 protocol, which is the IEEE standard for a high performance serial bus with similar, and more widely used technologies like the Universal Serial Bus 1.0 and the Ethernet Protocol. A thorough theoretical and experimental investigation between the technologies is made with respect to the actual architecture of the buses and their practical applications. Experiments include setting up a small network and testing the actual data transfer speeds of the protocols. Performance of these protocols in a general teleconferencing environment was also studied.