View source for Minimizing Round-Trip Time in Online Games

Multiplayer online games have become increasingly popular in the past few years,
and several market forecasts predict that online games will continue to grow in
terms of market revenues, number of users, and generated Internet traffic
volume.

Providing high-quality online gaming experience is challenging due to the
best-effort nature of the Internet. For large-scale distributed
systems in the Internet, high latency, insufficient bandwidth, and packet loss are the three
most common obstacles for providing good quality-of-service, and need to be carefully addressed.
Online games generate low bit rate streams with highly periodic
traffic patterns for frequent game-state updates, which are less sensitive to
bandwidth and packet loss. This is because the bit rates of these
traffic streams are much smaller than the capacity of broadband access links,
and packet losses can be absorbed by frequent game-state updates. In contrast,
online games require real-time interactions, and high latency becomes the main
challenge on providing high-quality gaming experience.

== People ==

* [http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mhefeeda/ Mohamed Hefeeda]

* [http://www.sfu.ca/~cha16/ ChengHsin Hsu (PhD student)]

* Cong Ly (MSc student)

== Software and  Data ==