Latency evaluation of networking mechanisms for game traffic

Abstract

Large improvements in computer technology allow thousands of users to concurrently interact in a virtual game. Due to this development, the body of work analyzing game traffic has grown considerably in the recent past. However, little work has been done to examine and compare networking techniques with respect to meeting the stringent latency requirements that are common for networked games. Most interactive games need response times between 100 and 1000 ms depending on the game genre [6]. In this paper, we evaluate different techniques for delivering packets in a timely manner. In particular, we compare existing user-space middleware running on top of UDP and reliable, fair transport protocols like TCP and SCTP. In addition, we evaluate some "low latency" extensions to TCP, SCTP and one of the middleware platforms. We present results concerning packet latency and bandwidth requirements for the different approaches.