On The Scaling Characteristics of MMORPG Traffic

In this paper a comprehensive scaling analysis of the traffic of the four most popular Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games (MMORPG) is presented. The examined games are World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Eve Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Both server and client generated traffic are analyzed in details. Our study reveals the basic statistical properties of the investigated games focusing on the correlation and scaling behavior. Although the examined games are all from the same genre and such basic statistics such as the mean packet rate, variation of the packet rate, skewness of the packet rate distributions fall into the same magnitude, the games exhibit diverse traffic characteristics. We have found that in spite of the fact that some similarities can be found among the scaling characteristics of these games they show versatile scaling properties and the games can not be treated with one common model.