Introduction

A key challenge for ISPs is to characterise and predict the impact of traditional TCP-based services on the user experience quality of emerging VoIP and IP video services in the broadband consumer space. A related challenge is to predict and understand how the growth of highly interactive online environments (such as real-time multiplayer games) will impact on, and be impacted by, VoIP, IP video and traditional TCP-based applications.

Building on previous work at CAIA under the GENIUS and SONG project, we aim to development traffic generator tools and empirically proven models of large scale consumer broadband traffic.

Project Goals

• Develop and release deployable open-source tools for traffic synthesis and generation.
• Extend theoretical work [1] on synthesis of game traffic for N-player scenarios.
• Provide empirically verified models for queue sizing (in broadband routers and modems), TCP congestion control algorithms, game and VoIP traffic interactions that create dynamic latency fluctuations experienced by all traffic usnig a given broadband link.
• Provide updated/new documentation as appropriate for all developed tools.

Project Leaders

• Grenville Armitage

Program Members

• Carl Javier
• Phillip Branch
• Tony Cricenti

This project has been made possible by a grant from Agilent Technologies Foundations (USA).