Abstract
This paper measures and compares the traffic of a series of Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Game (MMORPG). The purpose of this analysis is to characterize the MMORPG traffic and compare the traffic characteristics of those games caused by the game structure difference between 2D and 3D environment. The target game is 'Lineage I' and 'Lineage II' which represent world's largest MMORPGs in terms of the number of concurrent users. We collect about 280 giga bytes and 1 tera bytes of packet headers, respectively. We compare packet size, packet inter-arrival time and bandwidth usage of these two games. The MMORPG traffic consists of two kinds of packets: client-generated upstream packets and server-generated downstream packets. We observe that the upstream packet size of payload has grown from 9 bytes to 19 bytes, while the average payload size of downstream packets has grown from 37 bytes to 318 bytes. This asymmetry of growing rate is caused by 3D game structure. Packet inter-arrival time becomes shorter from average 2 milliseconds to 58 microseconds. Bandwidth consumption per client has grown from 4 kbps to 20 kbps. We find that there is a linear relationship between the number of users and the bandwidth usage in both case.
