Modeling ping times in first person shooter games

In First Person Shooter (FPS) games the Round Trip Time (RTT), i.e., the sum of the network delay from client to server and the network delay from server to client, impacts the gamer’s performance considerably. Game client software usually has a built-in process to measure this RTT (also referred to as ping time), and therefore gamers do not want to connect to servers with a long ping time. This paper develops a methodology to evaluate the ping time in a scenario where gamers access a common gaming server over an access network, consisting of a link per user that connects this user to a shared aggregation node that in turn is connected to the gaming server via a bottleneck link. First, a model for the traffic the users and the server generate, is proposed based on experimental results of previous papers. It turns out that the characteristics of the (downstream) traffic from server to clients differ substantially from the characteristics of the client-to-server (upstream) traffic. Th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Natalie Degrande, Danny De Vleeschauwer, Robert E. Kooij, M. R. H. Mandjes
• Keywords: Bottleneck Link, Computer Networks, CONEXT 2006, Gaming Server, Ping Time