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Traffic analysis and synthetic models of second life

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Caixa Postal 7851, Recife, PE, CEP 50732-970, Brazil

    Rafael Antonello, Stênio Fernandes, Josilene Moreira, Paulo Cunha, Carlos Kamienski & Djamel Sadok

  2. Federal Center for Education in Technology—Alagoas (CEFET-AL), Rua Barão de Atalaia, Maceió, AL, S/N CEP 57020-510, Brazil

    Stênio Fernandes

  3. Federal University of the ABC (UFABC), Rua Catequese, 242, Santo André, SP, CEP 09090-400, Brazil

    Carlos Kamienski

Authors
  1. Rafael Antonello
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  2. Stênio Fernandes
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  3. Josilene Moreira
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  4. Paulo Cunha
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  5. Carlos Kamienski
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  6. Djamel Sadok
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Correspondence to Stênio Fernandes.

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Antonello, R., Fernandes, S., Moreira, J. et al. Traffic analysis and synthetic models of second life. Multimedia Systems 15, 33–47 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-008-0125-1

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