Extrapolating server to client IP traffic from empirical measurements of first person shooter games

Modelling traffic generated by Internet based multiplayer computer games has attracted a great deal of attention in the past few years. In part this has been driven by a desire to properly simulate the network impact of highly interactive online game genres such as the first person shooter (FPS). Packet size distributions are an important element in the creation of plausible traffic generators for network simulators such as ns-2 and omnet++. In this paper we present a simple technique for creating representative packet size distributions for N-player FPS games based on empirically measured traffic of 2- and 3-player games. We illustrate the likely generality of our approach using data from Half-Life, Half-Life Counterstrike, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Counterstrike, Quake III Arena and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory