Traffic analysis of a social mobile game

Abstract

One of the smartphone's killer applications is the game. As the mobile game market grows drastically, we meet a lot of new smartphone games on the application stores everyday. In particular, mobile games have been equipped with social networking features, which is so called social mobile games. In general, mobile games usually require real-time transmission delay and minimum bandwidth contraints. However, troubleshooting or monitoring of mobile game traffic is not straightforward. Performance degradation during the online game is not easily detected or cannot be quickly resolved because of the complicated components of the smartphone game platform, which consists of accouting, distribution, social networking, application stores, advertisement, and related API servers. In this work, we present a measurmeent-based view of a representative social mobile game, Anipang, in Korea. From experiments, we show how Anipang works based on the social network service, Kakaotalk, and present case studies of performance anomalies.