Grenville Armitage
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the use of origin Autonomous System (AS) information to optimise online First Person Shooter (FPS) game server discovery. Online FPS games typically use a client-server model, with thousands of game servers active at any time. Traditional server discovery probes all available servers over multiple minutes in no particular order, creating thousands of short-lived UDP flows. Using Valve's Counterstrike:Source game this paper demonstrates a multi-step process: Sort available game servers by origin AS, probe a subset of servers in each AS, rank each AS in ascending order of estimated round trip time (RTT), then probe all remaining game servers according to the rank of their origin AS. Probing game servers in approximately ascending RTT expedites the identification of playable servers. This new approach may take less than 20% of the time and network traffic of conventional server discovery (without exceeding conventional server discovery time and traffic consumption in the worst case).
- G. Armitage, M. Claypool, and P. Branch, Networking and Online Games - Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games. United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., June 2006. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Valve Corporation, CounterStrike: Source, http://counter-strike.net/, accessed February 8th 2008.Google Scholar
- Valve Corporation, Server Queries, http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Server_Queries, as of February 7th 2008.Google Scholar
- QStat, http://www.qstat.org/, accessed February 8th 2008.Google Scholar
- PlanetLab, PlanetLab - An open platform for developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services, https://www.planet-lab.org/, accessed February 8th 2008.Google Scholar
- M. Claypool, "Network characteristics for server selection in online games," in ACM/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN), January 2008.Google Scholar
- C. Chambers, W.-C. Feng, F. W.-C., and D. Saha, "A geographic, redirection service for on-line games," in ACM Multimedia 2003 (short paper), November 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Armitage, C. Javier, and S. Zander, "Topological optimisation for online first person shooter game server discovery," in Proceedings of Australian Telecommunications and Network Application Conference (ATNAC), December 2006.Google Scholar
- MaxMind, GeoLite Country, http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country, accessed February 8th 2008.Google Scholar
- Y. Rekhter, T. Li, and S. Hares, "RFC 4271: A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)," Jan. 2006. {Online}. Available: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4271Google Scholar
- Quagga Software Routing Suite, http://www.quagga.net/, accessed February 8th 2008.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Optimising online FPS game server discovery through clustering servers by origin autonomous system
Recommendations
REED: Optimizing first person shooter game server discovery using network coordinates
Online First Person Shooter (FPS) games typically use a client-server communication model, with thousands of enthusiast-hosted game servers active at any time. Traditional FPS server discovery may take minutes, as clients create thousands of short-lived ...
Game server selection for multiple players
NetGames '05: Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for gamesThe increase in power and connectivity of computers has enabled a growth in network games, with many games having numerous servers to which a player can connect. The game server selected influences the game play, both by impacting the game type and map ...
Client-side adaptive search optimisation for online game server discovery
NETWORKING'08: Proceedings of the 7th international IFIP-TC6 networking conference on AdHoc and sensor networks, wireless networks, next generation internetThis paper describes a client-side, adaptive search technique to reduce both the time taken to discover playable online First Person Shooter (FPS) game servers and the number of network flows created during game server discovery. Online FPS games ...
Reviews
Hua-Yi Lin
This paper employs Valve's Counter-Strike:Source (CS:S) game methods to propose an optimized server discovery time on the Internet. The proposed scheme sorts game servers, detects a subset of servers, ranks each autonomous system (AS) according to the round-trip time (RTT), and probes all remaining game servers using the rank of the origin AS. The experiment indicates that, as a result, the proposed method significantly reduces the discovery server time and network traffic. The main contributions of this paper are the presentation of the proposed algorithms' calibrating clusters and terminating optimized probes, and the improvement of the game server discovery process. This scheme provides better performance for distant and near clients accessing game servers. Overall, this is a qualified paper, but it does have some weaknesses. Many notations and variables lack detailed descriptions, and several paragraphs are difficult to follow. For clarity, algorithms could have been presented with flowcharts or figures. These improvements would have enhanced the quality of the paper. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments