This document analyzes the characteristics of network traffic generated by online multiplayer games like Counter-Strike. It finds that game traffic has predictable periodic patterns as servers regularly broadcast updates. Counter-Strike traffic in particular uses UDP, has an average packet size around 80 bytes, and accounted for 3rd largest source of UDP packets behind DNS and RealAudio at the time. The study collected 500 million packets from over 5,000 Counter-Strike clients over one week to analyze bandwidth usage and packet sizes.

1. Networked Game
Traffic Analysis
1

2. Web
File Transfer
BitTorrent
Skype Calls
2

3. Understanding network traffic
is crucial to traffic engineering
and protocol design
3

4. What are the characteristic of
traffic generated by games?
4

5. data rate
packet size
UDP or TCP
pattern
5

6. Differences between
RTS
FPS
RPG
?
6

7. Counter Strike
7

8. 20,000
servers
as of May 2002
8

9. 3rd
largest source of UDP packets
(behind DNS and RealAudio)
9

10. Centralized Architecture
10

11. 32
players supported
11

12. 3
minutes per round
12

13. 30
minutes per map
13

14. Traffic includes
state updates
text messages
voice
:
14

15. How to collect packet traces?
15

16. Run own Counter Strike’s server
16

17. Collect packets over one week
17

18. 5886
different clients
18

19. 500
million packets analyzed
19

20. 500
million packets analyzed
20

21. 21

22. 22

23. 542 341
kbps kbps
mean out-going mean in-coming
bandwidth bandwidth
23

24. 24

25. 25

26. 26

27. 27

28. 28

29. 50 ms
periodic broadcast from server
29

30. 30

31. 31

32. 80.3
average packet size in bytes
32

33. 39.72 129.51
average in- average out-
coming packet going packet
size in bytes size in bytes
33

34. 34

35. small packets
(< 50 bytes)
35

36. periodic
36

37. predictable
37

38. Shen Zhou Online
38

39. 39

40. 20
hours of traces
40

41. 112,369
connections
41

42. 58
terra bytes of data
42

43. 43

44. 36% 52%
of packets are of packets are
23 27
bytes bytes
44

45. 45

46. 46

47. 7
kbps of bandwidth on average
47

48. 48

49. 49

50. 200 ms
periodic broadcast from server
50

51. 51

52. 52

53. 53

54. “flash crowd” effects
54

55. even smaller packets
55

56. small bandwidth
56

57. periodic
57

58. predictable
58

59. temporal locality
59

60. spatial locality
60