hi
first i would advise u to study the standard thoroughly... and also the amendments so that u will know the history of evolution... then u ll be knowing the pros and cons...
well go through a tutorial ... understand how the technology works, what all factors affect the performance ... stuff like bandwidth, throughput, distance between the nodes, etc .. try getting your hands on tutorial papers ...
reading the LAN standards document is a painful task .. try reading the basics from a book like tanenbaum or stallings ...
If you are evaluating "real world" ethernet performance then you must also take into account the operating system that is running the tcp/ip stack. Only "hard" real time os's will give you something approaching deterministic performance.