Performance impact of packet multiplexing on massive multiplayer online games

Abstract

Online games are more and more popular, resulting in an increasing share in the Internet traffic. These games generate a huge number of packets with typically small payloads, which overloads the network and deteriorates its efficiency. To mitigate these problems, it was proposed to use the tunnelling, compression and multiplexing (TCM) technique. Even though it was claimed via a set of emulations that this technique would enhance the network performance, there were no theoretical nor simulation studies to demonstrate its benefits on online gaming experience. In this paper, we implement TCM in NS-3 and set up online games scenarios in order to evaluate the performance of this technique in terms of delay, jitter and order of packets. The results show that with TCM the delay and jitter are more important than the native traffic for a small number of players due to the multiplexing periods. However, this situation is reversed when the number of players is high. Furthermore, the disorder of packets is always more important with TCM. In order to reduce the delay and the packets disorder, we propose a scenario where the online players are partitioned into subgroups based on their location on the game map. Simulations show that this leads to a significant performance improvement.