Towards Simulating the Communication Behavior of Real-Time Interactive Applications

Abstract

Real-Time Online Interactive Applications, e.g., multiplayer online games, connect a high number of users who interact with the application and with each other in real time, i.e., a response to a user's input should happen virtually immediately. We address the problem of reproducing the communication behavior of such applications in order to study the effect of various design decisions (application logic, underlying infrastructure, network protocols, etc.) at early stages of application development. We develop a flexible, lightweight simulator as an alternative to the state-of-the-art simulation approaches that rely on the recorded communication traffic of real applications. The advantage of our approach is that we can easily adapt to a particular application design and its underlying infrastructure and we can measure various communication metrics, without relying on existing application prototypes and real users. Our experiments demonstrate that the simulator realistically reproduces communication behavior for high numbers of users and that simulation results are very near to the communication patterns of recorded communication traffic, e.g., for the commercially successful multiplayer game Counter Strike.