IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
On the impact of delay on real-time multiplayer games
NOSSDAV '02 Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Broadband Network Traffic: Performance Evaluation and Design of Broadband Multiservice Networks: Final Report of Action Cost 242
Provisioning on-line games: a traffic analysis of a busy counter-strike server
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment
Latency and User Behaviour on a Multiplayer Game Server
NGC '01 Proceedings of the Third International COST264 Workshop on Networked Group Communication
Networked games: a QoS-sensitive application for QoS-insensitive users?
RIPQoS '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Revisiting IP QoS: What have we learned, why do we care?
The effect of latency on user performance in Warcraft III
NetGames '03 Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Network and system support for games
Proceedings of 3rd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
A synthetic traffic model for Quake3
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology
Analysis of factors affecting players' performance and perception in multiplayer games
NetGames '05 Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Research note: Source models of network game traffic
Computer Communications
A measurement study regarding quality of service and its impact on multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 9th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
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In First Person Shooter (FPS) games the Round Trip Time (RTT), i.e., the sum of the network delay from client to server and the network delay from server to client, impacts the gamer's performance considerably. Game client software usually has a built-in process to measure this RTT (also referred to as ping time), and therefore gamers do not want to connect to servers with a long ping time. This paper develops a methodology to evaluate the ping time in a scenario where gamers access a common gaming server over an access network, consisting of a link per user that connects this user to a shared aggregation node that in turn is connected to the gaming server via a bottleneck link. First, a model for the traffic the users and the server generate, is proposed based on experimental results of previous papers. It turns out that the characteristics of the (downstream) traffic from server to clients differ substantially from the characteristics of the client-to-server (upstream) traffic. Then, two queuing models are developed (one for the upstream and one for the downstream direction) and combined such that a quantile of the RTT can be calculated given all traffic and network parameters (packet sizes, packet inter-arrival times, link rate, network load, ...). This methodology is subsequently used to assess the (quantile of the) RTT in a typical Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access scenario. In particular, given the capacity dedicated to gaming traffic on the bottleneck link (between the aggregation node and gaming server), the number of gamers (or equivalently the gaming load the bottleneck link can support) is determined under the restriction that the quantile of the RTT should not exceed a predefined bound. It turns out that this tolerable load is surprisingly low in most circumstances. Finally, it is remarked that this conclusion depends to some extent on the details of the downstream traffic characteristics and that measurements reported in literature do not give conclusive evidence on the exact value of all parameters, such that, although the qualitative conclusion still remains valid, additional experiments could refine the detailed quantitative results.