Network Traffic Characteristics and Analysis in Recent Mobile Games

The landscape of mobile gaming has evolved significantly over the years, with profound changes in network reliability and traffic patterns. In the early 2010s, mobile games faced challenges due to unreliable networks and primarily featured asynchronous gameplay. However, in the current era, modern mobile games benefit from robust network connectivity, mirroring PC gaming experiences by relying on persistent connections to game servers. This shift prompted us to conduct an in-depth traffic analysis of two mobile games that represent opposite ends of the genre spectrum: a massively multiplayer game resembling PC MMORPGs with tightly synchronized gameplay, and a single-player puzzle game that incorporates asynchronous social interactions. Surprisingly, both games exhibited remarkably similar traffic footprints; small packets with short inter-packet arrival times, indicating their high expectations for network reliability. This suggests that game developers now prioritize network quality similarly to their PC gaming counterparts. Additionally, our analysis of packet lengths unveiled that recent mobile games predominantly employ short packets dominated by a few key packet types closely tied to player actions, which conforms to observations from PC online games. However, the self-similarity in traffic patterns, a notable feature in PC online games, only partially explains the traffic in mobile games, varying across genres. These findings shed light on the evolving traffic patterns in mobile games and emphasize the need for further research in this dynamic domain

Achieving Flexibility and Performance for Packet Forwarding and Data Center Management

Although today's networking equipment has achieved high performance and low cost by embedding forwarding logic in hardware, this has come at the price of severely reduced flexibility. In this dissertation, we address the problem of achieving both flexibility and performance in two networking domains: packet forwarding and data center networking. In packet forwarding, we present Software Defined Forwarding, a hybrid design that attempts to combine the high speed and low cost of hardware with the superior flexibility of software. Within the data center context, we propose Ripcord, a platform for data center routing and management. Through simulation, prototype implementation and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that these solutions achieve both flexibility and high performance in their respective contexts

Rethinking Packet Forwarding Hardware

For routers and switches to handle ever-increasing bandwidth requirements, the packet “fast-path ” must be handled with specialized hardware. There have been two approaches to building such packet forwarding hardware

Holding the Internet accountable

Today’s IP network layer provides little to no protection against misconfiguration or malice. Despite some progress in improving the robustness and security of the IP layer, misconfigurations and attacks still occur frequently. We show how a network layer that provides accountability, i.e., the ability to associate each action with the responsible entity, provides a firm foundation for defenses against misconfiguration and malice. We present the design of a network layer that incorporates accountability called AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol) and show how its features—notably, its use of self-certifying addresses—can improve both source accountability (the ability to trace actions to a particular end host and stop that host from misbehaving) and control-plane accountability (the ability to pinpoint and prevent attacks on routing).