Effects of Network Characteristics on Task Performance in a Desktop CVE System

Abstract

The influences of network characteristics on the task performance in a desktop collaborative virtual environment (CVE) system were studied. In the experiment, two participants worked together to accomplish a collaborative task and a network emulator was utilized to simulate real network characteristics. The task used in the experiment was designed to be highly interactive and had rigid requirements on network characteristics (e.g. latency and packet loss). The objective performance and subjective assessment were recorded and analyzed quantitatively as a function of network latency and packet loss rate. The experiment results show that network latency has no distinct effect on task performance when network latency is less than 200 ms and lightly affect task performance when network latency is between 200 and 600 ms; packet loss has no effect on task performance when there are 40 state update messages received per second and lightly affect task performance when there are between 15 and 40 state update messages received per second.