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

• Mohamed Hefeeda

• ChengHsin Hsu (Senior Researcher, Deutsche Telekom R&D Lab, California, USA)

• Cong Ly (MSc student)

Publications

• C. Ly, C. Hsu, and M. Hefeeda, Improving Online Gaming Quality using Detour Paths, In Proc. of ACM Multimedia 2010, 10 pages, Firenze, Italy, October 2010. (Acceptance: 14% -- Systems Track)