5G Performance Testing of Mobile Chatbot Applications

A Chatbot is an application that is designed to provide automated contextual communication. Today most chatbots are implemented on top of or as a gateway to popular messaging services, such as Facebook Messenger, Skype and Viber. Chatbots can be classified into many categories regarding their usage, such as conversational commerce, customer support, education, marketing and others. Due to their agile deployment ability on top of virtualized and serverless environments, chatbots are expected to play a pivotal role in the forthcoming 5G networks, which support virtualization capabilities at the edge of the network, making feasible the provision of diversified chatbot services customized to each user needs and requests. However, chatbot QoS might be affected under congested network conditions or in areas with poor signal reception quality. Currently, the performance of the chatbot has not been researched, while the users are experiencing only the results of the potential QoS degradation, such as loss or re-ordering of messages. This paper provides an experimental study of the chatbot apps performance/QoS under different network and reception conditions. The experiment was conducted using the 5G mobile network emulation testbed created and provided by the EU-funded TRIANGLE project.