Analysis of World of Warcraft traffic patterns and user behavior

Internet traffic measurements are necessary in order to both understand how the Internet is used and how new applications may affect the networks. World of Warcraft (WoW) is currently the most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with more than 11 million subscribers worldwide. In this paper, we present WoW results from traffic measurements performed in a Swedish commercial broadband access network. The data was obtained with deep packet and flow inspections using a commercial traffic monitoring tool. Data was collected during a 4 months period. The objective of the measurements was to analyze World of Warcraft traffic patterns and user behavior. We show weekly traffic patterns, session duration analyses, and traffic rate distributions. Also, we show how World of Warcraft usage varies depending on the households' broadband access rates.