Traffic analysis and synthetic models of second life

Abstract

Virtual Worlds (VW), such as Massive Multiplayer Online Social Games, have been gaining increasing attention in the last few years, mainly due to the new way users interact with them. However, little effort has been devoted to understand their traffic profile and the implications to the traffic management area. With the current growing rate of VWs' usage, their traffic demand could eventually impose a significant burden on the operation of a typical Internet Service Provider (ISP) network. In this paper, we seek to understand the traffic behavior of an increasingly popular VW application, namely Second Life (SL), from both the connection and network level perspectives. We also show results of a traffic analysis of a SL client, when an avatar performs different actions in the VW, at different places and under different network conditions. Our results show that SL makes intensive use of network resources (mostly bandwidth), since the capacity needed for having a full SL experience (listening to live music) may reach 500 kbps. We then extend the traffic analysis work on SL by providing analytical models for its traffic profile. We aim at helping the network management and planning area to estimate the impact of an intense use of such VW on access links or core networks. Such synthetic models are also useful to the networking research community for the use in network simulations.

Mundos Virtuais na prática docente: uma visão sobre os desafios e benefícios

“…Tal problema acaba por ser recorrente, conforme experiências anteriores vividas pelos autores deste artigo, e, também apontado nas pesquisas de [Antonello et al 2009] e [Oliver et al 2010]. Tanto o professor quanto os alunos podem se sentir desmotivados em usar o ambiente, sendo este fator essencial no planejamento da infraestrutura tecnológica necessária.…”

Toward region- and action-aware second life clients: A parameterized second life traffic model

“…For comparison we have also implemented an existing traffic model [8], which is denoted as Current in figures. We employ the model parameters given in Antonello et al [8].…”

“…For comparison we have also implemented an existing traffic model [8], which is denoted as Current in figures. We employ the model parameters given in Antonello et al [8]. We did not compare our model against Ferreira and Morla [9] because their model consists of several manually-chosen parameters, while their values were not reported.…”

“…Two studies [8,9] have been conducted in the effort to model the network traffic of Second Life. These two models are trace-specific; in contrast our traffic model is parameterized and is applicable in different regions and with different actions.…”

“…However, the existing Second Life models [8,9] are trace-specific, because a set of parameters are estimated for each network trace, and thus cannot be used in region-and action-aware Second Life clients. To address this limitation, we propose a general, parameterized traffic model to predict the two important traffic characteristics: packet size and packet interarrival time.…”