Traffic characteristics of a massively multi-player online role playing game

  • Authors:

  • Jaecheol Kim;Jaeyoung Choi;Dukhyun Chang;Taekyoung Kwon;Yanghee Choi;Eungsu Yuk

  • Affiliations:

  • Seoul National University, Shinlim-dong, Kwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea;Seoul National University, Shinlim-dong, Kwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea;Seoul National University, Shinlim-dong, Kwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea;Seoul National University, Shinlim-dong, Kwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea;Seoul National University, Shinlim-dong, Kwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea;NCsoft Corp., Samsung-dong, Kangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea

  • Venue:
  • NetGames '05 Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper presents traffic measurement of a Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Game (MMORPG). This analysis characterizes the MMORPG traffic and shows its implications for future research issues. The target game is 'Lineage II' developed by NCsoft, which is one of the world's largest MMORPGs in terms of the number of concurrent users. We collected about 1 tera bytes of packets for four consecutive days including a weekend. The MMORPG traffic consists of two kinds of packets: client-generated packets and server-generated packets. We observe that the client packet has an average of 19 bytes payload size, while the average payload size of server packets is about 318 bytes. This asymmetry is due to the fact that the server transmits all the information to construct the visual environment for the clients in the same region. Likewise, the bandwidth usage of the server traffic is about ten times larger than that of the client traffic. The analysis of RTT reveals that client packets and server packets are transmitted mostly at the interval of 200 milliseconds due to TCP's delayed ACK. We find that there is a linear relationship between the number of users and the bandwidth usage except when the number of users is around 5000.