ARMA(1,1) modeling of Quake4 Server to client game traffic

Abstract

Modeling traffic generated by Internet based multiplayer computer games has attracted a great deal of attention in the past few years. In part this has been driven by a need to simulate correctly the network impact of highly interactive online game genres such as the first person shooter (FPS). Packet size distributions and autocorrelation models are important elements in the creation of realistic traffic generators for network simulators such as ns-2 and OMNET++. In this paper we show that ARMA(1,1) models capture the time series behaviour of Quake4 game traffic well. We also show that the random component of the ARMA models (the innovations) have distributions that appear to change little as the number of players increases.