Extrapolating server to client IP traffic from empirical measurements of first person shooter games

ABSTRACT

Modelling traffic generated by Internet based multiplayer computer games has attracted a great deal of attention in the past few years. In part this has been driven by a desire to properly simulate the network impact of highly interactive online game genres such as the first person shooter (FPS). Packet size distributions are an important element in the creation of plausible traffic generators for network simulators such as ns-2 and omnet++. In this paper we present a simple technique for creating representative packet size distributions for N-player FPS games based on empirically measured traffic of 2- and 3-player games. We illustrate the likely generality of our approach using data from Half-Life, Half-Life Counterstrike, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Counterstrike, Quake III Arena and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory.

REFERENCES

• 1: G. Armitage, Networking and Online Games, John Wiley & Sons, 2006
• 2: Borella, M., "Source models of network game traffic," Computer Communications, 23 (4). 403--410.
• 3: Carlos Cunha , Azer Bestavros , Mark Crovella, Characteristics of WWW Client-based Traces, Boston University, Boston, MA, 1995
• 4: Johannes Färber, Network game traffic modelling, Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games, p.53-57, April 16-17, 2002, Bruanschweig, Germany [doi>10.1145/566500.566508]
• 5: Johannes Färber, Traffic Modelling for Fast Action Network Games, Multimedia Tools and Applications, v.23 n.1, p.31-46, May 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:MTAP.0000026840.45588.64]
• 6: Wu-chang Feng , Francis Chang , Wu-chi Feng , Jonathan Walpole, Provisioning on-line games: a traffic analysis of a busy counter-strike server, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment, November 06-08, 2002, Marseille, France [doi>10.1145/637201.637223]
• 7: Wu-chang Feng , Francis Chang , Wu-chi Feng , Jonathan Walpole, A traffic characterization of popular on-line games, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.13 n.3, p.488-500, June 2005 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2005.850221]
• 8: Floyd, S. and Kohler, E., "Internet Research Needs Better Models," in First Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks, (Princeton, New Jersey, 28-29 October).
• 9: Lang, T. and Armitage, G., "A ns2 model for the Xbox system link game HALO," in Proc. Australian Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference, (Melbourne, Australia, December 2003).
• 10: Lang, T., Armitage, G., Branch, P. and Choo, H., "A synthetic traffic model for Half-Life," in Proc. of the Australian Telecommunications Network and Applications Conference, (Melbourne, December 2003).
• 11: Tanja Lang , Philip Branch , Grenville Armitage, A synthetic traffic model for Quake3, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology, p.233-238, June 03-05, 2005, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1067343.1067373]
• 12: Vern Paxson, Empirically derived analytic models of wide-area TCP connections, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.2 n.4, p.316-336, Aug. 1994 [doi>10.1109/90.330413]
• 13: Swinburne University of Technology, "Simulating Online Network Games (SONG) database," 2006 http://caia.swin.edu.au/sitcrc, 27 July2006
• 14: Sebastian Zander , Grenville Armitage, A traffic model for the Xbox game Halo 2, Proceedings of the international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video, June 13-14, 2005, Stevenson, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/1065983.1065987]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations
          Subjects: Network monitoring

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Internet (e.g., TCP/IP)

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
first person shooter, games, teletraffic analysis, traffic engineering