Performance Impact of Packet Multiplexing on Massive Multiplayer Online Games

摘要

Online games become more and more popular with the last years, and their network traffic is continuously increasing. They periodically generate a large amount of packets of relatively small size, which overload the Internet network and deteriorates its efficiency. To reduce the occupied network bandwidth by online games traffic, the so called Tunnelling, Compression and Multiplexing (TCM) approach has been recently proposed. However, even if it was claimed via a set of emulations that the TCM is expected to improve network delay and throughput, there were no theoretical nor simulation studies to demonstrate its benefits for online gaming experience which can be influenced by other network parameters as well. This paper focuses on the TCM performance evaluation for online gaming, via a careful set up of NS-3 simulations, devoted to measure performance metrics such as the transmission delay, the jitter and the arrival order of packets. It is shown that, for a small number of simultaneous players, the delay and the jitter deteriorate with the use of the TCM. On the contrary, the TCM improves the delay and the jitter in the case of a large number of players. Unfortunately, the packet order is always worse with the TCM, compared with the standard transmission protocol. However, these metrics can be greatly improved if, in addition to the TCM, the players are partitioned into groups based on their location on the game map (areas of interest).