While there have been network studies of traditional network games and streaming video, there is less work measuring cloud-based game streaming traffic and none on Google's Stadia. This paper presents experiments that provide a first look, measure Stadia game traffic for several games, analyzing the bitrates, packet sizes and inter-packet times, and comparing the results to other applications. Results indicate Stadia, unlike traditional network game systems, rapidly sends large packets downstream and small packets upstream, similar to but still significantly different than video and at much higher rates than previous cloud-based game systems or video.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Paper draft: pdf
• Slides: pptx
• Slides video: mp4

See also:

• Mark Claypool, David Finkel, Alexander Grant and Michael Solano. On the Performance of OnLive Thin Client Games, Springer Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ) - Special Issue on Network Systems Support for Games, Volume 20, Issue 5, Pages 471-484, DOI 10.1007/s00530-014-0362-4, February 2014. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/onlive-journal/