Network analysis of Counter-strike and Starcraft

Claypool, Mark; LaPoint, D.; Winslow, Jane Futrell

doi:10.1109/pccc.2003.1203707

Cited by 31 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…15 The LAN game was 1 player versus 1 player (1v1), and the Battle.net games had 1 player versus 1 player game and a 2 player team versus another 2 player team (2v2) game. Unlike other popular networked games [8] (and unlike Age of Mythology and Command and Conquer: Generals), Warcraft III uses TCP as the transport protocol with port 6112 for the server. All IP traces were performed on the client machines.…”

Section: Traffic For Full Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effect of latency on user performance in Real-Time Strategy games

Claypool

2005

Computer Networks

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Section: Traffic For Full Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All three traces have low bitrates that can easily be achieved with a modem. In comparison, Starcraft, 16 the previous generation RTS game from Blizzard, has a bitrate of about 5 Kbps for a two-player game [8], similar to that of Warcraft III. Fig.…”

Section: Traffic For Full Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of latency on user performance in Real-Time Strategy games

Claypool

2005

Computer Networks

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“…In addition, while incoming packets have an extremely narrow distribution centered around the mean size of 40 bytes, outgoing packets have a much wider distribution around a significantly larger mean. This is not surprising as the game server itself is logically playing the role of a broadcaster: taking state information from each client, aggregating the results, and broadcasting it out to all other clients [23]. Such application-level broadcasts generate larger packets and cause the outgoing bandwidth to exceed the incoming bandwidth even though the rate of incoming packets exceeds that of outgoing packets.…”

Section: Tiny Packetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A traffic characterization of popular on-line games

Feng

Chang

Feng

et al. 2005

IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking

141

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Abstract-This paper describes the results of the first comprehensive analysis of a range of popular on-line, multiplayer, game servers. The results show that the traffic behavior of these servers is highly predictable and can be attributed to the fact that current game designs target the saturation of the narrowest, last-mile link. Specifically, in order to maximize the interactivity of the game itself and to provide relatively uniform experiences between players playing over different network speeds, on-line games typically fix their usage requirements in such a way as to saturate the network link of their lowest speed players. While the traffic observed is highly predictable, the traces also indicate that these on-line games provide significant challenges to current network infrastructure. As a result of synchronous game logic requiring an extreme amount of interactivity, a close look at the trace reveals the presence of large, highly periodic, bursts of small packets. With such stringent demands on interactivity, routers must be designed with enough capacity to quickly route such bursts without delay.

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“…Academic research into on-line gaming covers a diverse set of research disciplines, such as artificial intelligence [9,22] human-computer interaction [14], economics [27], computer graphics [7,26,63], security [6] and networking [32,15,13]. The overlap of networking research and games research is of particular interest to us.…”

Section: Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing Cheating and Workload Characterization in Online Games

Feng

Chambers

2000

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The Internet has enabled the popular pastime of playing video games to grow rapidly by connecting game players in disparate locations. However, with popularity have come the two challenges of hosting a large number of users and detecting cheating among users. For reasons of control, security, and ease of development, the most popular system for hosting on-line games is the client server architecture. This is also the most expensive and least scalable architecture for the game publisher, which drives hosting costs upwards with the success of the game. In addition to the expense of hosting, as a particular game grows more competitive and popular, the incentive to cheat for that game grows as well. All popular online games suffer from cheats in one form or another, and this cheating adversely affects game popularity and growth.In this dissertation we follow a hypothetical game company (GameCorp) as it surmounts challenges involved in running an on-line game. We develop a characterization of gamer habits and game workloads from data sampled over a period of years, and show the benefits and drawbacks of multiplexing online applications together in a single large server farm. We develop and evaluate a geographic redirection service for the public server architecture to match clients with servers. We show how the public server game architecture can be used to scalably host large persistent games such as massively multiplayer (MMO) games that previously used the client server architecture. Finally we develop a taxonomy for client cheating in on-line games to focus research efforts, and specifically treat one of the categories in detail: information exposure in peer-to-peer games.The thesis of this dissertation is: a methodology for accurate usage modeling of server resources can improve workload management; public-server resources can be leveraged in new ways to serve multiplayer on-line games; and that information exposure in peer-to-peer on-line games is preventable or detectable with the adoption of cryptographic protocols. ADDRESSING CHEATING AND WORKLOAD CHARACTERIZATION

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Network analysis of Counter-strike and Starcraft

Cited by 31 publications

References 9 publications

The effect of latency on user performance in Real-Time Strategy games

The effect of latency on user performance in Real-Time Strategy games

A traffic characterization of popular on-line games

Addressing Cheating and Workload Characterization in Online Games

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