QoS Provisioning for Real-Time Interactive Applications: From Network Performance to User Satisfaction
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Chen, Kuan-Ta
DOI
en-US
Abstract
In recent years, QoS (Quality-of-Service) provisioning for real-time interactive applications, such as online gaming, has been actively discussed because of the popularity of such applications. However, the design of non-QoS-enabled Internet and the requirement of real-timeliness, interactivity, and bi-directionality of the applications together make the goal of QoS provisioning immensely challenging.
One of the main obstacles to provide satisfactory user experience for network applications is that, unlike system-level performance metrics, such as bandwidth or latency, user satisfaction is intangible and unmeasurable. The key to this problem is to measure users' opinions about network performance objectively and efficiently.
We endeavored in this work to explore the problem of QoS-provisioning for real-time interactive applications in a number of aspects. We aim at two applications, VoIP and online gaming, as our target of study for two reasons. First, they are considered killer applications since the emergence of World Wide Web, and have been part of the primary reasons people use the Internet. The second and more important reason is that, interpersonal interaction and entertainment are usually the goals for the mass to use the computer and Internet, where VoIP and online gaming could be seen representative applications that fulfill those fundamental demands.
Our work is classified into two parts. In the first part, we thoroughly analyze the traffic generated from online game playing. We aim to identify potential performance bottlenecks that could be served a basis to develop more efficient network infrastructure for such applications. In the second part, we strive for emph{objectively} measuring the users' perception when using VoIP and gaming applications based on the network conditions the users experience. Our goal is to define a objectively assessable metric for QoS-provisioning of real-time interactive applications through the mapping from system-level performance metrics to user-level satisfaction measures.
Our main contributions are three-fold: 1) We pointed out the potential performance problems of online gaming and proposed some possible solutions; 2) We proposed to infer users' awareness of network QoS by the time they spend on a service, e.g., game playing or Internet phone. Also, we proposed and verified a user satisfaction measure for Skype, which is computed based on the network conditions users experience; 3) We proposed a number of strategies to cope with the prevalent but undesirable use of online game bots, where our methods are shown generalizable across different games and robust under counter-attacks from bot developers.
Subjects
線上遊戲
網路電話
服務品質
Online Games
VoIP
Skype
QoS
Type
thesis
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