Title: Distribution of first person shooter online multiplayer games

Authors: Grenville Armitage, Philip Branch

Addresses: Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, Swinburne University of Technology, P.O. Box 218, Hawthorn, 3122 Victoria, Australia. ' Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, Swinburne University of Technology, P.O. Box 218, Hawthorn, 3122 Victoria, Australia

Abstract: This paper uses data captured during our online game trials to answer some fundamental questions regarding game distribution for online, first person shooter games. First person shooter games are popular, generate large amounts of traffic and have stringent delay requirements. They offer both great opportunities and great challenges to games distributors. We deal with three key issues in this paper. The first is tolerable network latency. This is addressed through identifying the limits to latency that customers will accept. The second is jitter. We show that jitter is highly correlated with latency and so managing latency effectively manages jitter. Finally, we provide a simple model of game traffic that will enable game distributors to estimate the networking requirements for their deployment.

Keywords: network latency; jitter; network games; teletraffic modelling; online games; internet; online gaming; game distribution; first person shooter games; game traffic; network capacity planning; network design; network delay; latency tolerance; letency variation; bandwidth requirements; game servers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMC.2005.007723

International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication, 2005 Vol.1 No.1, pp.59 - 75

Published online: 04 Sep 2005 *

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