An empirical evaluation of TCP performance in online games

A fundamental design question to ask in the development of a network game is—Which transport protocol should be used—TCP, UDP, or some other protocols? Seeking an ob-jective answer to the choice of communication protocol for MMORPGs, we assess whether TCP, a popular choice, is suitable for MMORPGs based on empirical evidence. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first evaluation of transport protocol performance using real-life game traces. We analyze a 1, 356-million-packet trace from ShenZhou Online, a TCP-based, commercial, mid-sized MMORPG. Our analysis indicates that TCP is unwieldy and inappropri-ate for MMORPGs. This is due to four distinctive charac-teristics of MMORPG traffic: 1) tiny packets, 2) low packet rate, 3) application-limited traffic generation, and 4) bi