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Analysis of multi-player online game traffic based on self-similarity

Published: 30 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

When provisioning network resources, ISPs have to tackle with the difficulties imposed by the traffic characteristics and demands of the users. Multi-player online games (MPOG) are constituting a large portion of the Internet traffic. MPOG players demand high bandwidth and low delay due to high interaction in these games. Moreover, they generate bursty traffic. In this paper, we analyze the traffic characteristics of a popular MPOG type game; Call of Duty 2 version 1.0 (CoD2). We use several game sessions to extract packet size and inter-arrival time distributions. In addition to these we investigate the self-similarity of the CoD2 traffic. We observe two different behavior at server and client-side, as expected. For the server-side, traffic characteristics vary with the number of players, but the traffic is long-range dependent most of the time. There are several intervals when the traffic process is non-stationary where the analysis of self-similarity becomes trivial. For the client-side, the traffic shows little variations however there are still some cases where the analysis of self-similarity becomes intricate because the traffic process reveals deviation from stationarity.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        NetGames '06: Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
        October 2006
        350 pages
        ISBN:1595935894
        DOI:10.1145/1230040
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 30 October 2006

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        Author Tags

        1. Hurst parameter
        2. multi-player first person shooter games
        3. self-similarity
        4. traffic analysis

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        • (2024)First Steps Towards Game and Activity Inference on Encrypted VR Datastreams2024 IEEE 25th International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM60985.2024.00030(105-110)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
        • (2014)Dissecting the protocol and network traffic of the OnLive cloud gaming platformMultimedia Systems10.1007/s00530-014-0370-420:5(451-470)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2014
        • (2013)An Analysis of Players and Bots Behaviors in MMORPGProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 27th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications10.1109/AINA.2013.108(870-876)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2013
        • (2013)The Ex-Gaussian distribution as a model of first-person shooter game trafficMultimedia Systems10.1007/s00530-012-0272-219:3(221-229)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2013
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        • (2009)Revisiting coexistence of poissonity and self-similarity in Internet traffic2009 IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis & Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems10.1109/MASCOT.2009.5366239(1-10)Online publication date: Sep-2009
        • (2009)A generalised prediction model of first person shooter game traffic2009 IEEE 34th Conference on Local Computer Networks10.1109/LCN.2009.5355165(213-216)Online publication date: Oct-2009
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        • (2007)Do nintendo handhelds play nice?Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games10.1145/1326257.1326273(87-92)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2007

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