Traffic Analysis Beyond This World: the Case of Second Life
Stênio Fernandes, Rafael Antonello, Josilene Aires Moreira, Djamel Fawzi Hadj Sadok, Carlos Kamienski · 2007
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, from both the connection and network level perspectives. We also show results of a traffic analysis of a Second Life client, when an avatar performs different actions in the virtual world, at different places and under different network conditions. Our results show that Second Life makes intensive use of network resources (mostly bandwidth), since the capacity needed for having a full second life experience (listening to live music) may reach 700 Kbps.