
Proceedings Paper
Network characteristics for server selection in online gamesFormat | Member Price | Non-Member Price |
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Paper Abstract
Online gameplay is impacted by the network characteristics of players connected to the same server. Unfortunately, the
network characteristics of online game servers are not well-understood, particularly for groups that wish to play together
on the same server. As a step towards a remedy, this paper presents analysis of an extensive set of measurements of game
servers on the Internet. Over the course of many months, actual Internet game servers were queried simultaneously by
twenty-five emulated game clients, with both servers and clients spread out on the Internet. The data provides statistics on
the uptime and populations of game servers over a month long period an an in-depth look at the suitability for game servers
for multi-player server selection, concentrating on characteristics critical to playability--latency and fairness. Analysis
finds most game servers have latencies suitable for third-person and omnipresent games, such as real-time strategy, sports
and role-playing games, providing numerous server choices for game players. However, far fewer game servers have the
low latencies required for first-person games, such as shooters or race games. In all cases, groups that wish to play
together have a greatly reduced set of servers from which to choose because of inherent unfairness in server latencies and
server selection is particularly limited as the group size increases. These results hold across different game types and even
across different generations of games. The data should be useful for game developers and network researchers that seek
to improve game server selection, whether for single or multiple players.
Paper Details
Date Published: 28 January 2008
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6818, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2008, 681808 (28 January 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.775138
Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6818:
Multimedia Computing and Networking 2008
Reza Rejaie; Roger Zimmermann, Editor(s)
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6818, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2008, 681808 (28 January 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.775138
Show Author Affiliations
Mark Claypool, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (United States)
Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6818:
Multimedia Computing and Networking 2008
Reza Rejaie; Roger Zimmermann, Editor(s)
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