Analyzing the Network Traffic Requirements of Multiplayer Online Games

In recent years, distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have become one of the major network applications, mainly due to the enormous popularity of multiplayer online games in the entertainment industry. Although the workload generated by avatars in a DVE system has already been characterized, the actual network traffic requirements of multiplayer online games are usually limited (hidden) by the available network bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the measurement of the network traffic requirements of the most popular MOGs by monitoring the network traffic generated by different game tournaments in a LAN party. The network infrastructure was explicitely designed and implemented for that event by a network service provider, achieving a sustained bandwidth of 100 Mbps for each network interface. Therefore, the potential bandwidth bottleneck was moved from the network to another element of the system or application. The results show that the aggregated bandwidth required by these applications is not higher than 1600 Kbps. Also, the results show identical variations in the network traffic sent to some of the clients by the game server. These results can be used as a basis for an efficient design of MOGs infrastructure.