Characterization of Human Mobility in Networked Virtual Environments

Siqi Shen, Niels Brouwers, Alexandru Iosup, Dick H.J. Epema

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The design and tuning of networked virtual environments (NVEs) such as World of Warcraft (WoW), require understanding the in-NVE mobility characteristics of their citizens. Although many mobility-aware NVE systems already exist, their validation and further development have been hampered by the lack of public datasets and of comparison studies based on multiple datasets. To address these two issues, in this work we collect from WoW mobility traces for over 30,000 virtual citizens, and compare these traces with traces collected from Second Life (SL) where the environment is designed and changed significantly by the citizens themselves. Furthermore, motivated by the existence of numerous studies and models of networked real-world environments (NRE), we systematically compare the characteristics of two NVE and two NRE mobility traces. Our comparative study reveals that long-tail distributions characterize well various mobility characteristics, that the invisible boundary of human movement also appears for NVEs, and that areavisitation shows personal preferences. We also find several differences between NVE and NRE mobility characteristics. © 2014 ACM.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 24th ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, NOSSDAV 2014, Singapore, March 19-20, 2014
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages13-18
Number of pages6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event24th ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, NOSSDAV 2014 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 19 Mar 201420 Mar 2014

Workshop

Workshop24th ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, NOSSDAV 2014
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period19/03/1420/03/14

Keywords

  • Mobility characterization
  • Network virtual environment

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