Gaming network delays investigation and collection of very large-scale data sets
Ben Ward, Youry Khmelevsky, Gaétan Hains, Rob Bartlett, Alex Needham, Tyler Sutherland · 2017 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon) · 2017
The WTFast's Gamers Private Network (GPN®) is a client/server solution that makes online games faster. GPN®connects online video-game players with a common game service across a wide-area network. Online games are interactive competitions by individual players who compete in a virtual environment. Response time, latency and its predictability are keys to GPn®success and runs against the vast complexity of internet-wide systems. We have built an experimental network of virtualized GPN®components so as to carefully measure the statistics of latency for distributed Minecraft games and to do so in a controlled laboratory environment. This has led to a better understanding of the coupling between parameters such as: the number of players, the subset of players that are idle or active, the volume of packets exchanged, the size of packets, latency to and from the game servers, and time-series for most of those parameters. In this paper we investigate specific game traffic connection types and show how we could collect very large-scale data sets of gaming metadata to control gaming network performance in real time. Such investigation and conducted experimentations will improve quality of service for GPN®systems and their reliability.