Discussion Overview
   What were the main contributions of the work?

Due to the recent global explosion of on-line multiplayer games, it is becoming more important to understand its network behavior and usage in order to provision and design future network infrastructure. 

This paper characterizes the main gaming traffic behavior, that is, the traffic behavior of this heavily loaded game server is highly predictable and can be attributed to the fact that current game designs target the saturation of the narrowest, last-mile link.

Farther more the paper predicates that as current routers are designed for bulk data transfers with larger packets, a significant, concentrated deployment of online game servers will have the potential for overwhelming current networking equipment. It is very important to provision and design future network infrastructure.

 

   What were the approach of the research?

The approach of the research including following methods:

First of all the authors use a table to summarize the trace itself to show the main results of  the research, including maps played, user sessions established, the average connection time of each player, the bandwidth of incoming and outgoing, and all packet trace and data which were send during this time frame etc.

            Second the authors use a few methods to show the predictability of the trace  including the figure of average bandwidth and packet load observed by the server at variance time scales, to show the trace is visually stable over the long term and then they use the standard variance aggregate methods to measure the variability of the 

Finally the researchers use the figure of both PDF and CDF of the package distribution to draw out the conclusion that current game designs target the saturation of the narrowest, last-mile link.

   What are the ongoing work for the research

Other pieces in the provisioning puzzle

每Aggregate player populations

每Geographic distributions of players over time (IP2Geo)

Impact on route and packet classification caching 

Other FPS games

每HL-based:  Day of Defeat

每UT-based: Unreal Tournament 2003, America's Army

每Quake-based: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

每Results apply across other FPS games and corroborated by other studies

 

   What are potential avenues for further work and improvements?

 Games as passive measurement infrastructure

每Only widespread application with continuous in-band ping information being delivered (measurement for free)

每※Ping times§ of all clients broadcast to all other clients every 2-3 seconds

每20,000+ servers, millions of clients

Games as active measurement infrastructure

每Thriving FPS mod community and tools

每Server modifications [Armitage01]