Modeling Traffic for Online Games

Characterizing traffic for online games

First-Person-Shooter Games

• A Packet-level Traffic Model of Starcraft, by A. Pescape, A. Dainotti, and G. Ventre, Hot-P2P 2005, July 2005.

• A Traffic Model for the XBOX Game Halo 2, by A. Zander and G. Armitage, NOSSDAV 2005, June 2005.

• A Ns2 Model for the Xbox System Link Game "HALO", by T. Lang and G. Armitage, ATNAC 2003, December 2003.

• A Synthetic Traffic Model for Quake 3, by T. Lang, P. Branch, G. Armitage, ACM SIGCHI ACE2004, June 2004.

• A Synthetic Traffic Model for Half Life, by T. Lang, G. Armitage, P. Branch, and H-Y. Choo, ATNAC 2003, December 2003.
  The four papers above from the Genius project present typical inter-packet arrival distributions and packet size distributions, and comment on possible simple ns-2 traffic generators.

General

• Searching for Invariants in Network Games Traffic, A. Dainotti, A. Botta, A. Pescape, and G. Ventre, poster at the Co-Next 2006 Student Workshop, December 2006.

• Game Traffic Analysis: an MMORPG Perspective, K. Chen, P. Huang, C. Huang, and C. Lei, NOSSDAV, 2005.
  "We analyze a 1,356-million-packet trace from a sizeable MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), ShenZhou Online... We find that the MMORPG and FPS (First-Person Shooting) games are similar in that they both generate small packets and require low bandwidths... More distinctive are the strong periodicity, temporal locality, and irregularity observed in the MMORPG traffic."