Abstract

Network games are becoming increasingly popular, but have received little attention from the academic research community. The network traffic patterns of the multiplayer games Counter-strike and Starcraft were examined and documented. Analysis focused on bandwidth usage and packet size. The games were found to have small packets and typically low bandwidth usage, but traffic patterns varied widely between games. Modules for these two games reflecting these findings were added to the network simulator NS.

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See also:

• Mark Claypool, David LaPoint, and Josh Winslow. Network Analysis of Counter-strike and Starcraft, In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC), Phoenix, Arizona, USA, April 2003. Online at: /~claypool/papers/net-game/