Generally you always want your cameras to be on dedicated links, or at least only sharing bandwidth with other cameras. The transport mechanism used by GigE Vision doesn't really share bandwidth well with other devices. If you are only sharing bandwidth on a given link with other cameras, you can throttle them each to take only a certain percentage of the total bandwidth. If you have any non-camera devices on the link, they don't usually have any mechanism to control the inter-frame gap of bandwidth throttling to the degree that GigE vision does that would be needed to properly share bandwidth without dropping packets.
If you end up sharing one of the ports for both camera operation and configuring the CVS over the network, you'll be at risk of losing image data packets whenever other traffic is sent. While there are mechanisms in place for resending data, these add latency and jitter to your acquisition.
Eric
