Bandwidth efficiency improvement of online games by the use of tunneling, compressing and multiplexing techniques

The enterprises that develop online games need hardware and bandwidth resources in order to give a good service to the users. These games produce a high rate of small UDP packets from the client to the server, so the overhead is significant. The actions of the players have to be propagated to the server and to the rest of the players in a very short time, so network delays are very critical. This work presents a method that saves bandwidth, by the addition of a local agent which queues packets, compresses headers and uses a tunnel to send a number of packets into a multiplexed one. The behaviour of the system has been studied for IPv4 and IPv6, showing that significant bandwidth savings can be achieved. For certain titles, up to 38% of the bandwidth can be saved for IPv4. This percentage grows up to 54% for IPv6, as this protocol has a bigger overhead. The cost of these bandwidth savings is the addition of a new delay, which has an upper bound that can be modified. So there is a tradeoff: the bigger the added delays, the bigger the bandwidth savings. On the other hand, the tests show that if the number of players is big enough, the added delays can be acceptable in terms of user's experience.