Some thoughts on emulating jitter for user experience trials

Authors:
Grenville Armitage;Lawrence Stewart
Affiliations:
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Year:
2004

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Abstract

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 user-experience 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 user-experience trials built around low-cost, unix-based networking tools.