Some thoughts on emulating jitter for user experience trials

It is usually hard to control the network conditions affecting public online game servers when studying the impact of latency, loss and jitter on user experience. This leads to a natural desire for running user-experience trials under controlled network conditions, and hence a requirement for accurate (or at least predictable) emulation of IP level latency, loss and jitter on a localized network testbed. In this short paper we reflect on some experiences with running userexperience trials, and specifically evaluate the utility and limitations of using FreeBSD’s kernel-resident dummynet module to introduce controlled jitter. We expect these insights will stimulate further userexperience trials built around low-cost, unix-based networking tools. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.1 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network Architecture and Design – network communications, packet-switcing networks C.2.3 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network Operations – network monitoring...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NETGAMES
• Authors: Grenville J. Armitage, Lawrence Stewart
• Keywords: Controlled Network Conditions, NETGAMES 2004, Network Conditions, Userexperience Trials