Measurement and characterization of Internet gaming traffic

Abstract

Most of the recent computer game releases support multiplayer options over Internet connections. The amount of Internet traffic generated by computer games can be expected to increase fast, especially when the new wave of players enters the Internet with the next generation game consoles that support Internet connections. In order to provide insight into this new but already significant part of Internet traffic, we have conducted a study of a number of popular Internet games. We defined four different classes of games: action games, simulators, real time strategy games, and turn based strategy games. Traffic generated by the representatives of these four different classes was measured and analyzed in terms of packet size distribution and packet interarrival time distribution. One of the main results of this study was that the amount of traffic generated by different games could vary heavily. For example, an action game could generate almost 15 kbps on average, while a turn based strategy game generated less than 1 kbps of traffic. In general, we observed small packets of a few distinct sizes rather than continuous packet size distributions. In most cases, interarrival times could be modeled by multimodal distributions consisting of extreme, normal or exponential distributions