A Hierarchical HMM Model for Online Gaming Traffic Patterns

Online games seem to become major contributors to Internet traffic. Therefore a great deal of effort is being devoted to the analysis and modeling of network game traffic. However the results from the previous measurements have not been unified into a single frame work while gaming traffic model is of high importance to network designers. Considering the fact that gaming traffic is generated by the player's interaction during game sessions, we propose to model the player's activities and later use this model to extract the traffic pattern. We will propose a model for the gaming player behavior regarding traffic generation based on hierarchical hidden Markov model. Player activities are inherently highly complicated. In order to deal with the complicated player activities, it is necessary to incorporate a hierarchical structure in representation of activities, in which a player activity is represented by a combination of multiple activity units, or actions. Any action or any combination of actions may occur during a game session. The HHMM hierarchy ends in production states that result in the transmission of update messages to the game server. HHMM Observations are considered to be client packet size and packet interarrival time.