Dissecting the protocol and network traffic of the OnLive cloud gaming platform

Cloud gaming is a new paradigm that is envisaged to play a pivotal role in the video game industry in forthcoming years. Cloud gaming, or gaming on demand, is a type of online gaming that allows on-demand streaming of game content onto non-specialised devices (e.g. PC, smart TV, etc.). This approach requires no downloads or game installation because the actual game is executed on the game company’s server and is streamed directly to the client. Nonetheless, this revolutionary approach significantly affects the network load generated by online games. As cloud gaming presents new challenges for both network engineers and the research community, both groups need to be fully conversant with these new cloud gaming platforms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate OnLive, one of the most popular cloud gaming platforms. Our key contributions are: (a) a review of the state-of-the-art of cloud gaming; (b) reverse engineering of the OnLive protocol; and (c) a synthetic traffic model for OnLive.     

MMORPG Player actions: Network performance, session patterns and latency requirements analysis

Providing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) is a big challenge for future mobile, IP-based networks. Understanding how the players’ actions affect the network parameters, the game platform, and the overall perceived quality is highly relevant for the purposes of game design, as well as for the networking infrastructure and network support for games. We break player actions down into discrete categories, and show that each category is distinct in terms of several key metrics. We discuss which categories of actions could be supported on current mobile devices, and present evidence in form of a user survey demonstrating the demand for such services. The starting points into the discussion include the networking, session and latency requirements for particular player actions on one side, and the players’ interest on the other. The Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW) is used as a case study.