Network Traces of Virtual Worlds: Measurements and Applications
Description
Although network traces of virtual worlds are valuable to ISPs (Internet service providers), virtual world software developers, and research communities, they do not exist in the public domain. In this work, we implement a complete testbed to efficiently collect and analyze network traces from a popular virtual world: Second Life. We use the testbed to gather traces from 100 regions with diverse characteristics. The network traces represent more than 60 hours of virtual world traffic and the trace files are created in a wellstructured and concise format. Our preliminary analysis on the collected traces is consistent with previous work in the literature. It also reveals some new insights: for example, local avatar/object density imposes clear implications on traffic patterns. The developed testbed and released trace files can be leveraged by research communities for various studies on virtual worlds. For example, accurate traffic models can be derived from our trace files, which in turn can guide developers for better virtual world designs.
Access
The files are available for download via HTTP. Link: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/mmsys-dataset/2011/second-life/download.html First release of network traces collected from 100 Second Life regions. The tar file can be downloaded: Link: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/mmsys-dataset/2011/second-life/traces.v1.tgz
References and Citation
Use of the datasets in published work should be acknowledged by a full citation to the paper [WHS11] at the MMSys conference (MMSys 11, February 23-25, San Jose, California, USA, Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0517-4/11/02).
References
WHS11: Y. Wang, C. Hsu, J. Singh, X Liu, Network Traces of Virtual Worlds: Measurements and Applications, Proceedings of the First ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), San Jose, CA, USA, February 23-25, 2011.