Pub Date : 2013-12-09DOI: 10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820607
De-Yu Chen, Po-Ching Lin, Kuan-Ta Chen
With the growing popularity of online mobile games, the network traffic generated by them accounts for an increasingly significant proportion of mobile Internet traffic; however, the game's traffic characteristics have not been well studied. To understand more about such traffic, we analyze the network traffic of 9 online mobile games from 3 genres, namely, first-person shooting games, role-playing games, and racing games. Our results show that small payloads, high packet rates, and an excessive number of pure TCP ACK packets incur high traffic overheads. The payloads may have redundant content, which can be properly compressed. Given the increasing number of pay-by-volume and throttling 3G/4G data plans, gamers may not realize they are being overcharged due to such overheads. We find that the game traffic can be largely compressed even with small window sizes, which indicate that the packet payload tend to be redundant and may be reduced without compromising users' gaming experience.
{"title":"Does online mobile gaming overcharge you for the fun?","authors":"De-Yu Chen, Po-Ching Lin, Kuan-Ta Chen","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820607","url":null,"abstract":"With the growing popularity of online mobile games, the network traffic generated by them accounts for an increasingly significant proportion of mobile Internet traffic; however, the game's traffic characteristics have not been well studied. To understand more about such traffic, we analyze the network traffic of 9 online mobile games from 3 genres, namely, first-person shooting games, role-playing games, and racing games. Our results show that small payloads, high packet rates, and an excessive number of pure TCP ACK packets incur high traffic overheads. The payloads may have redundant content, which can be properly compressed. Given the increasing number of pay-by-volume and throttling 3G/4G data plans, gamers may not realize they are being overcharged due to such overheads. We find that the game traffic can be largely compressed even with small window sizes, which indicate that the packet payload tend to be redundant and may be reduced without compromising users' gaming experience.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133026245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-12-09DOI: 10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820604
Julien Gascon-Samson, Bettina Kemme, J. Kienzle
Provisionning network resources for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) poses interesting challenges due to the fact that the load can greatly vary depending on the time or other in-game factors. In this paper, we propose Lamoth, a cloud middleware for MMOGs that provides an interface for in-game message dissemination. Lamoth handles the exchange of game messages between nodes by making use of an arbitrary number of off-the-shelve pub/sub servers deployed in the cloud depending on the game scenario. In order to evaluate our platform, we implement Lamoth on top of Mammoth, McGill's research-oriented MMOG, and conduct extensive experiments by triggering situations which would cause networks bottlenecks. Our evaluations show that Lamoth can allow a MMOG to scale to high numbers of players and can properly handle extremely-demanding in-game situations if enough resources are provided.
{"title":"Lamoth: A message dissemination middleware for MMOGs in the cloud","authors":"Julien Gascon-Samson, Bettina Kemme, J. Kienzle","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820604","url":null,"abstract":"Provisionning network resources for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) poses interesting challenges due to the fact that the load can greatly vary depending on the time or other in-game factors. In this paper, we propose Lamoth, a cloud middleware for MMOGs that provides an interface for in-game message dissemination. Lamoth handles the exchange of game messages between nodes by making use of an arbitrary number of off-the-shelve pub/sub servers deployed in the cloud depending on the game scenario. In order to evaluate our platform, we implement Lamoth on top of Mammoth, McGill's research-oriented MMOG, and conduct extensive experiments by triggering situations which would cause networks bottlenecks. Our evaluations show that Lamoth can allow a MMOG to scale to high numbers of players and can properly handle extremely-demanding in-game situations if enough resources are provided.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130665193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-12-09DOI: 10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820608
De-Yu Chen, Hao-Tsung Yang, Kuan-Ta Chen
Lag denotes the event when an application fails to respond user inputs in a timely fashion and is considered one of the most common annoyances that impair online gaming experience. Despite years of effort devoted by game developers and network designers trying to overcome lags, gamers still suffer from this annoying phenomenon. It seems to many gamers that lag is an unavoidable part of online gaming and sometimes they just give up fighting it. In this paper, we tackle the lag problem by investigating the root cause of lags for gamers. We develop a software called Game Experience Monitor (GEM), which monitors the performance of gamers' computers and the quality of network paths during game play, and use the collected traces to correlate players' perceived experience to find out the common cause of lags. Our analysis reveals that, surprisingly, while it is a common belief that the instability of Internet paths is the major cause of lags, the overloading of players' computers in fact plays a more decisive role to lag. It is hoped that this counter-common-belief finding will motivate further research for providing a better infrastructure for gaming and other real-time interactive applications.
{"title":"Dude, the source of lags is on your computer","authors":"De-Yu Chen, Hao-Tsung Yang, Kuan-Ta Chen","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820608","url":null,"abstract":"Lag denotes the event when an application fails to respond user inputs in a timely fashion and is considered one of the most common annoyances that impair online gaming experience. Despite years of effort devoted by game developers and network designers trying to overcome lags, gamers still suffer from this annoying phenomenon. It seems to many gamers that lag is an unavoidable part of online gaming and sometimes they just give up fighting it. In this paper, we tackle the lag problem by investigating the root cause of lags for gamers. We develop a software called Game Experience Monitor (GEM), which monitors the performance of gamers' computers and the quality of network paths during game play, and use the collected traces to correlate players' perceived experience to find out the common cause of lags. Our analysis reveals that, surprisingly, while it is a common belief that the instability of Internet paths is the major cause of lags, the overloading of players' computers in fact plays a more decisive role to lag. It is hoped that this counter-common-belief finding will motivate further research for providing a better infrastructure for gaming and other real-time interactive applications.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130518944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We study an optimization problem to maximize the cloud gaming provider's total profit while achieving just-good-enough Quality-of-Experience (QoE). The optimization problem has exponential running time, and we develop an efficient heuristic algorithm. We also present an alternative formulation and algorithms for closed cloud gaming services, in which the profit is not a concern and overall gaming QoE needs to be maximized. We conduct extensive trace-driven simulations, which show that the proposed heuristic algorithms: (i) achieve close-to-optimal solutions, (ii) always achive 80+% QoE level, and (iii) outperform the state-of-the-art placement heuristic by up to 3.5 times in profits.
{"title":"QoE-aware virtual machine placement for cloud games","authors":"Hua-Jun Hong, De-Yu Chen, Chun-Ying Huang, Kuan-Ta Chen, Cheng-Hsin Hsu","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820610","url":null,"abstract":"We study an optimization problem to maximize the cloud gaming provider's total profit while achieving just-good-enough Quality-of-Experience (QoE). The optimization problem has exponential running time, and we develop an efficient heuristic algorithm. We also present an alternative formulation and algorithms for closed cloud gaming services, in which the profit is not a concern and overall gaming QoE needs to be maximized. We conduct extensive trace-driven simulations, which show that the proposed heuristic algorithms: (i) achieve close-to-optimal solutions, (ii) always achive 80+% QoE level, and (iii) outperform the state-of-the-art placement heuristic by up to 3.5 times in profits.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114427438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-12-09DOI: 10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820617
R. Diaconu, Joaquín Keller, M. Valero
Minecraft is a popular game with more than 20 million paying users and many more playing the free version. However, in multiplayer mode, only a few thousand users can play together. Our measurements show that, even reducing the landscape, i.e., the map, to a uniform flat land, a server cannot host significantly more users. For a common use case, when players cannot modify the map, we have designed and implemented Manycraft, an architecture to scale the number of users. Minecraft protocol messages are of three kinds: control, entity and map. In our approach, Kiwano, a distributed infrastructure for scaling virtual worlds, takes care of the entity related messages while the others are processed by a Minecraft server assigned to the player.
{"title":"Manycraft: Scaling minecraft to millions","authors":"R. Diaconu, Joaquín Keller, M. Valero","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820617","url":null,"abstract":"Minecraft is a popular game with more than 20 million paying users and many more playing the free version. However, in multiplayer mode, only a few thousand users can play together. Our measurements show that, even reducing the landscape, i.e., the map, to a uniform flat land, a server cannot host significantly more users. For a common use case, when players cannot modify the map, we have designed and implemented Manycraft, an architecture to scale the number of users. Minecraft protocol messages are of three kinds: control, entity and map. In our approach, Kiwano, a distributed infrastructure for scaling virtual worlds, takes care of the entity related messages while the others are processed by a Minecraft server assigned to the player.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127122742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-12-09DOI: 10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820602
Ah Reum Kang, Juyong Park, H. Kim
The life and evolution of a social group - its birth, growth, decline, and possible demise - have long been the focus of social science research. The birth and the early growth patterns of social groups, in particular, have been studied relatively little because of the lack of detailed data that describe the trajectories of groups during their early lives. In this paper, we report the major factors that govern the early dynamics of the evolution of social groups that are found in the complete data about user behaviors and activities for ArcheAge, a large-scale Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). We find that in the early stages of a game where uncertainties prevail regarding the stability of a group, prospects for benefit are the more important factor in a group's growth than personal or social loyalty.
{"title":"Loyalty or profit? Early evolutionary dynamics of online game groups","authors":"Ah Reum Kang, Juyong Park, H. Kim","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820602","url":null,"abstract":"The life and evolution of a social group - its birth, growth, decline, and possible demise - have long been the focus of social science research. The birth and the early growth patterns of social groups, in particular, have been studied relatively little because of the lack of detailed data that describe the trajectories of groups during their early lives. In this paper, we report the major factors that govern the early dynamics of the evolution of social groups that are found in the complete data about user behaviors and activities for ArcheAge, a large-scale Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). We find that in the early stages of a game where uncertainties prevail regarding the stability of a group, prospects for benefit are the more important factor in a group's growth than personal or social loyalty.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132137124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2013-12-09DOI: 10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820616
M. Valero, R. Diaconu, Joaquín Keller
Minecraft is a popular game with more than 20 million paying users and many more playing the free version. However, in today's multiplayer mode, only a few thousand users can play together. For a common setting, when players cannot modify the map, we have designed a distributed system to scale the number of users. The Manycraft software runs on users' machines which communicate through Kiwano infrastructure. This paper describes its architecture and implementation. Manycraft node is available for download at http://manycraft.net, so we expect players to participate and join the demonstration at the given time slot.
{"title":"Manycraft: Massively distributed minecraft","authors":"M. Valero, R. Diaconu, Joaquín Keller","doi":"10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/NETGAMES.2013.6820616","url":null,"abstract":"Minecraft is a popular game with more than 20 million paying users and many more playing the free version. However, in today's multiplayer mode, only a few thousand users can play together. For a common setting, when players cannot modify the map, we have designed a distributed system to scale the number of users. The Manycraft software runs on users' machines which communicate through Kiwano infrastructure. This paper describes its architecture and implementation. Manycraft node is available for download at http://manycraft.net, so we expect players to participate and join the demonstration at the given time slot.","PeriodicalId":289229,"journal":{"name":"2013 12th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames)","volume":"53 62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123563411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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