Evaluating QoS for Real-Time Applications Using a Lightweight Simulation of Network Traffic
Tim Humernbrum, Christian Ahlbrand, Sergei Petrovich Gorlatch · 2018 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC) · 2018
We consider a challenging class of networked applications – Real-Time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA), with examples like multiplayer online games, that pose hard QoS requirements on the underlying network. We address the problem of evaluating how the application’s Quality of Experience (QoE) is influenced by different techniques of enforcing the network QoS, like adaptive routing or queueing, and to what extent these techniques improve the overall application performance. For this purpose, we develop a lightweight simulator as an alternative to the state-of-the-art approaches that rely on the recorded communication traffic of real applications. Our simulator can be easily adapted to a particular application design and its underlying network and can measure various communication metrics, without relying on existing application prototypes and real users. Our experiments with the commercially successful multiplayer games Counter Strike and StarCraft II demonstrate that the simulator can very accurately evaluate their communication-related QoE metrics for high numbers of users.