Characterizing the gaming traffic of World of Warcraft: From game scenarios to network access technologies

Over the past decade, massively multiplayer online role-playing games have become very popular and profitable, and they have attracted millions of people to play for fun in the virtual world. In this article, we first identify the fundamental challenges in MMORPG traffic analysis. Then, we mainly focus on the impact of the application scenarios and the network access technologies on the online gaming traffic. We carry out measurements and analysis of the traffic patterns of World of Warcraft (WoW) in three distinct gaming scenarios: downtown, hunting, and battling. Also in order to evaluate the impact of different network access technologies, we connect to the Internet through Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and mobile WiMAX. Based on the captured traces, we measure WoW traffic in terms of bandwidth consumption, delay, packet loss rate, packet size and packet inter-arrival time. Our real-trace analysis shows that the MMORPG traffic is highly dynamic with various game scenarios and the network performance is strongly affected by the network access technologies. To facilitate the simulation, we also develop a generalized traffic model by characterizing the MMORPG traffic dynamics.