Generation of synthetic workloads for multiplayer online gaming benchmarks

Triebel, Tonio; Lehn, Max; Rehner, Robert; Guthier, Benjamin; Kopf, Stephan; Effelsberg, Wolfgang

doi:10.1109/netgames.2012.6404028

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Triebel et al [17] study both the mobility of avatars and their interactions. They compare the movement of avatars guided by mobility models versus movements generated by artificial intelligence techniques.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they suffer from the same issues of testing a DVE in a real setting: it is difficult to collect real traces and, in particular, they may be not suitable to validate the system on an extreme or specific scenario. Synthetic traces are usually not extremely precise in simulating avatars' movement but present many clear advantages in contrast with real traces [17], such as (i) scalability, to stress the DVE support in limit situations, (ii) reproducibility, as synthetic traces can be reused on different systems in order to have a common ground for comparison.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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TRACE: Generating Traces from Mobility Models for Distributed Virtual Environments

Carlini

Lulli

Ricci

2017

Euro-Par 2016: Parallel Processing Workshops

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The development and evaluation of a proper mobility model is an essential feature to evaluate a system that manages a virtual world. In distributed virtual environments, this is also more important because each avatar requires a consistent view of the world that usually is splitted on multiple machines. Several models have been proposed in the literature to describe avatars' mobility, but a single environment supporting the generation of traces from different models to enable a simple comparison of them is still lacking. In this work we present a tool that implements popular mobility models and supports the generation of traces generated by them. This may help developers to easily validate their systems using several mobility models. Our tool provides a unified format to describe the traces, enables the generation of traces for thousands of avatars and defines an API enabling the integration of additional models.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

TRACE: Generating Traces from Mobility Models for Distributed Virtual Environments

Carlini

Lulli

Ricci

2017

Euro-Par 2016: Parallel Processing Workshops

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“…Finally, Triebel et al study both the mobility of avatars and their interactions. They compare the movement of avatars guided by mobility models versus movements generated by artificial intelligence techniques.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it can be difficult to collect a large and heterogeneous number of real traces, and, especially, they may be not suitable to validate the DVE on extreme and specific scenarios. On the other hand, synthetic traces generation provides a simulation of avatars' movements and presents many advantages with respect to real traces. First, they provide good means to test the scalability in terms of avatars number, often going beyond the actual capacity of real‐world virtual environments; second, synthetic traces are reproducible and easily embeddable in different applications and configurations, providing a common ground toward comparison; third, they aim to realism, with a number of mobility models released to capture the peculiar behavior of different kind of avatars and virtual environments (see Section 2).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, synthetic traces generation provides a simulation of avatars' movements and presents many advantages with respect to real traces 14 . Normally, two widespread ways are exploited to represent avatars' movements (often referred to as traces 12 ): real traces taken from an instance of a running virtual environment application, or synthetic traces generated from mobility models that try to simulate the behavior of the avatars.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Model driven generation of mobility traces for distributed virtual environments with TRACE

Carlini

Lulli

Ricci

2017

Concurrency and Computation

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Avatars' mobility is an essential element to design, validate, and compare different distributed virtual environment architectures. It has a direct impact on the management of such systems because it defines the workload associated with the areas in the virtual world. Currently, a relevant part of this evaluation is conducted by means of synthetic traces generated through mobility models. Despite that, in the last decade, several models have been proposed in literature to describe avatars mobility. However, a standard methodology that drives researchers in their evaluation does not yet exist. In order to alleviate this issue, we present TRACE, an open source tool supporting the generation and analysis of traces by means of embedded mobility models. TRACE's ultimate aim is to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of virtual environments and allow researchers to focus on developing their solution rather than spend time to code and test custom mobility traces. TRACE provides a unified format to describe the traces. It enables scalable and efficient trace generation and analysis for thousands of avatars with seven built-in models.Also, it defines APIs enabling the integration of additional models, different configurations of the environment, and several built-in metrics to analyze the generated traces. KEYWORDS distributed virtual environment, mobility model, multiplayer games, open source 1 INTRODUCTION On-line gaming entertainment has received lots of popularity in the last decade from both industry and research communities. This attention is justified by the economic growth of the sector, in which massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft 1 or Second Life 2 represent a remarkable member. From a practical point of view, massively multiplayer online games that are large-scale distributed applications are a synchronous, persistent, and interactive virtual environment that allows a huge amount of users worldwide to share a real-time virtual environment.In these applications, each individual is in control of a virtual character called avatar. The avatar is free to move in a virtual world, perform actions, activities relative to the game, and meet other avatars.One of the largest area of research in this context is to foster the transition of virtual environments from client-server to distributed applications.Such approaches, broadly referred to as distributed virtual environments (DVEs), 3 aim at achieving scalability and cost-effectiveness, by orchestrating the support of the virtual environment to exploit the computational and network resources of the users of the DVE. Common approaches for the definition of the distributed support are based on unstructured 4,5 and structured 6,7 peer-to-peer technologies, as well as more centralized technologies like cloud computing 8 .In such distributed approaches, a user resource (ie, peer) concurrently works both as client for an (usually single) avatar and as server for a part of the virtual world. This organization allows to exploit the inherent scalabili...

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On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads

et al. 2014

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We present approaches to the generation of synthetic workloads for benchmarking multiplayer online gaming infrastructures. Existing techniques, such as mobility or traffic models, are often either too simple to be representative for this purpose or too specific for a particular network structure. Desirable properties of a workload are reproducibility, representativeness, and scalability to any number of players. We analyze different mobility models and AI-based workload generators. Real gaming sessions with human players using the prototype game Planet PI4 serve as a reference workload. Novel metrics are used to measure the similarity between real and synthetic traces with respect to neighborhood characteristics. We found that, although more complicated to handle, AI players reproduce real workload characteristics more accurately than mobility models.

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Generation of synthetic workloads for multiplayer online gaming benchmarks

Cited by 4 publications

References 13 publications

TRACE: Generating Traces from Mobility Models for Distributed Virtual Environments

TRACE: Generating Traces from Mobility Models for Distributed Virtual Environments

Model driven generation of mobility traces for distributed virtual environments with TRACE

On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads

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