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Title

A packet arrival model for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory online server discovery traffic

Author(s)

Armitage, Grenville J.

Abstract

Clients for online multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) games typically discover game servers through a two-step process. Clients initially query a well-known master server for a list of currently registered game servers, and then sequentially probe each game server in the order they were returned by the master server. The starting and stopping of clients over time creates a 24-hour cycle of 'background noise' (probe traffic) impacting on registered game servers, independent of a given server's actual popularity with players. Based on over 10 million probe packets from two topologically distinct Wolfenstein Enemy Territory servers in 2006, this paper shows that probe arrivals are uncorrelated and exhibit exponentially distributed inter-probe intervals during both busiest and least-busy hours of the 24-hour cycle. A modified Laplace curve is then shown to be a reasonable estimator of lambada for the exponentially distributed probe arrivals during any hour of the day. The ability to easily synthesise probe traffic patterns will augment existing approaches to modeling the IP traffic loads experienced by game servers and network devices attached to game servers.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies. Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures

Source

Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Networks (ICON 2007), Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, 19-21 November 2007, pp. 31-36

Publication year

2007

Keyword(s)

Client-server systems;  Computer games;  Exponential distribution;  First person shooter games;  FPS games;  IP networks;  Multiplayer computer games;  Telecommunication traffic;  Wolfenstein Enemy Territory

Publisher

IEEE

ISBN

1424412307

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICON.2007.4444057

Copyright

Copyright © 2007 IEEE. Published version of the paper reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

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