Network traffic analysis and evaluation of a multi-user virtual environment

Virtual world applications allow users to interact within a simulated world. Network responsiveness and reliability contribute to the user experience, thus being able to model and reproduce certain network scenarios is a key issue to assure proper user experience and for being able to provide an estimation of the required network resources. The present study aims to model the client network traffic for the virtual world application Open Wonderland as the basis to tools for evaluating its network requirements. A micro scale modelling was performed, studying the outgoing network traffic from a black box approach that omits the details of traffic generation of the subcomponents and focuses on their overall combined traffic. The model obtained provides high goodness of fit for audio and object synchronisation traffic, reflected in a Pearson correlation coefficient close to its maximum value and low deviation figures measured by Root Mean Square Deviation.