skip to main content
research-article

REED: Optimizing first person shooter game server discovery using network coordinates

Authors Info & Claims
Published:22 May 2012Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

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 packet flows while probing all available servers to find a selection of game servers with tolerable round trip time (RTT). REED reduces a client's probing time and network traffic to 1% of traditional server discovery. REED game servers participate in a centralized, incremental calculation of their network coordinates, and clients use these coordinates to expedite the discovery of servers with low RTTs.

References

  1. Agarwal, S. and Lorch, J. R. 2009. Matchmaking for online games and other latency-sensitive p2p systems. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication. ACM, New York, NY, 315--326. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Armitage, G. 2003. An Experimental Estimation of Latency Sensitivity in Multiplayer Quake3. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Networks.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Armitage, G. 2008a. Client-side Adaptive Search Optimisation for Online Game Server Discovery. In Proceedings of International Federation for Information Processing Conference on Networking. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Armitage, G. 2008b. Optimising Online FPS Game Server Discovery through Clustering Servers by Origin Autonomous System. In Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Armitage, G., Javier, C., and Zander, S. 2006. Topological optimisation for online first person shooter game server discovery. In Proceedings of the Australian Telecommunications and Network Application Conference.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Beigbeder, T., Coughlan, R., Lusher, C., Plunkett, J., Agu, E., and Claypool, M. 2004. The effects of loss and latency on user performance in Unreal Tournament 2003. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Network and System Support for Games. ACM, New York, NY, 144--151. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Chambers, C., Feng, W.-C., W.-C., F., and Saha, D. 2003. A geographic, redirection service for on-line games. In Proceedings of ACM Multimedia. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Claypool, M. 2008. Network characteristics for server selection in online games. In Proceedings of the Annual Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Dabek, F., Cox, R., Kaashoek, F., and Morris, R. 2004. Vivaldi: a decentralized network coordinate system. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication. ACM, New York, NY, 15--26. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Feng, W.-C. and Feng, W.-C. 2003. On the geographic distribution of on-line game servers and players. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Network and System Support for Games. ACM Press, New York, NY. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. Francis, P., Jamin, S., Jin, C., Jin, Y., Raz, D., Shavitt, Y., and Zhang, L. 2001. Idmaps: a global internet host distance estimation service. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 9, 5, 525--540. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Gummadi, K. P., Saroiu, S., and Gribble, S. D. 2002. King: Estimating latency between arbitrary internet end hosts. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement. ACM, New York, NY, 5--18. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Henderson, T. 2002. Observations on game server discovery mechanisms. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Network and System Support for Games. ACM, New York, NY, 47--52. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Hoberock, J. and Bell, N. 2010. Thrust C++ template library for CUDA. http://code.google.com/p/thrust/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Ledlie, J., Pietzuch, P., and Seltzer, M. 2006. Stable and accurate network coordinates. In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 74. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Lee, Y., Agarwal, S., Butcher, C., and Padhye, J. 2008. Measurement and estimation of network QoS among peer Xbox 360 game players. In Proceedings of the 9th Passive and Active Network Measurement Conference (PAM '08). Springer, 41--50. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Lua, E. K., Griffin, T., Pias, M., Zheng, H., and Crowcroft, J. 2005. On the accuracy of embeddings for internet coordinate systems. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement. USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, 11--11. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Ng, T. and Zhang, H. 2002. Predicting internet network distance with coordinates-based approaches. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM. 170--179.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Ng, T. S. E. and Zhang, H. 2001. Towards global network positioning. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement. ACM, New York, NY, 25--29. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  20. PlanetLab. 2008. Planetlab - an open platform for developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services. https://www.planet-lab.org/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Valve Corporation. 2009a. Counterstrike: Source. http://counter-strike.net/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Valve Corporation. 2009b. Master server query protocol. http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Master_Server_Query_Protocol.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Valve Corporation. 2009c. Server queries. http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Server_Queries.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Valve Corporation. 2009d. Welcome to Steam. http://www.steampowered.com/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. Vik, K.-H., Griwodz, C., and Halvorsen, P. 2009. On the influence of latency estimation on dynamic group communication using overlays. Proceedings of the Annual Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference. R. Rejaie and K. D. Mayer-Patel, Eds.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Wong, B., Slivkins, A., and Sirer, E. G. 2005. Meridian: a lightweight network location service without virtual coordinates. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication. ACM, New York, NY, 85--96. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Zander, S., Kennedy, D., and Armitage, G. 2005. Dissecting server-discovery traffic patterns generated by multiplayer first person shooter games. In Proceedings of 4th Workshop on Network and System Support for Games. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. REED: Optimizing first person shooter game server discovery using network coordinates

    Recommendations

    Reviews

    Dana Petcu

    The effort required to locate a set of available servers for game playing can take minutes. The aim of this work is to minimize this time. The proposed solution, REED, applies the latest technologies in virtual network coordinates to minimize the network traffic and limit the per-flow state imposed on network devices near the client. REED is based on centralized and incremental calculations of game server coordinates distributed over time. The tests performed using REED show a significant and impressive reduction of probing time and network traffic. In the reported case, using PlanetLab's worldwide distributed platform, the solution reduced these measures to one percent of that with traditional server discovery. The paper presents an interesting approach to server discovery that will be of interest both to network specialists and online game designers. The detailed description enables reproduction of the experiments. Online Computing Reviews Service

    Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

    Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader
    About Cookies On This Site

    We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

    Learn more

    Got it!