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On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads

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Abstract

We present approaches to the generation of synthetic workloads for benchmarking multiplayer online gaming infrastructures. Existing techniques, such as mobility or traffic models, are often either too simple to be representative for this purpose or too specific for a particular network structure. Desirable properties of a workload are reproducibility, representativeness, and scalability to any number of players. We analyze different mobility models and AI-based workload generators. Real gaming sessions with human players using the prototype game Planet PI4 serve as a reference workload. Novel metrics are used to measure the similarity between real and synthetic traces with respect to neighborhood characteristics. We found that, although more complicated to handle, AI players reproduce real workload characteristics more accurately than mobility models.

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Notes

  1. This categorization is inspired by Fan et al. [7], who divide the tasks of a P2P game into six issues, of which five also apply to client/server infrastructures.

  2. The relation between quality of service and quality of experience is far from trivial and a field of research on its own. Specifically for games, there has been research on player performance depending on network properties [1].

  3. Using dead reckoning techniques [13], position updates might not be sent in a precisely fixed frequency, but instead to a certain degree depend on the players' activities. Still, there is usually a minimum and maximum rate at which these updates are transmitted. On average, they are thus expected to show a more regular behavior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Databases and Distributed Systems, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Max Lehn, Robert Rehner & Alejandro Buchmann

  2. Department of Computer Science IV, Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Tonio Triebel, Benjamin Guthier, Stephan Kopf & Wolfgang Effelsberg

Authors
  1. Max Lehn
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  2. Tonio Triebel
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  3. Robert Rehner
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  4. Benjamin Guthier
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  5. Stephan Kopf
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  6. Alejandro Buchmann
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  7. Wolfgang Effelsberg
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robert Rehner.

Additional information

This work has been co-funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the collaborative research center (SFB) 1053 "MAKI: Multi-Mechanism Adaptation for the Future Internet" and the research training group (GRK) 1343 "Topology of Technology".

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Lehn, M., Triebel, T., Rehner, R. et al. On synthetic workloads for multiplayer online games: a methodology for generating representative shooter game workloads. Multimedia Systems 20, 609–620 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0359-z

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