A Ns2 model for the Xbox System Link game Halo

This paper presents our development of a synthetic traffic model for Microsoft Xbox System Link traffic. The goal is a traffic model that can be used by researchers and Internet Service Provider engineers to estimate the potential future impact of Xbox traffic over IP networks. We developed our ns2 simulation model for System Link traffic by running live network experiments and characterising the observed packet length, packet inter-arrival times, and data rates (in packets- and bits- per second). Our observations are documented in this paper, and we expect our traffic model will assist network planners who wish to better support real-time game traffic.