Traffic analysis and synthetic models of second life

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.