[e2e] packet size distribution of Internet traffic

[grenville armitage]

Jianping Pan wrote:
	[..]
> Any length models for non-TCP traffic? Thanks,

Online game traffic models are probably of some interest to
queue sizing, etc (as they're likely to be a growing source
of demand for some interactivity support in IP access links).
They tend to be UDP and distributed under 250 bytes for intra-game
(interactive) phases of the games, although inter-game periods
can show MTU-limited packets as servers download maps or stats.

A counter-strike example:

 Wu-chang Feng, Francis Chang, Wu-chi Feng, Jonathan Walpole.,
  "Provisioning On-line Games: A Traffic Analysis of a Busy Counter-Strike Server,"
  SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop, November 2002
  http://www.icir.org/vern/imw-2002/imw2002-papers/168.pdf

>From my local site some graphs of captured QuakeIII and HALO traffic:

 M.D. Pozzobon, "Quake 3 Packet and Traffic Characteristics,"
     CAIA Technical Report 021220A, Dec 2002
     http://caia.swin.edu.au/genius/021220A/

 M.D. Pozzobon, "Capturing Xbox System Link Traffic while playing Halo,"
     CAIA Technical report 020802A, Aug 2002
     http://caia.swin.edu.au/genius/020802A/
    (this one is a little different because system link games aren't
     optimized for Internet use, although tunneling bridges such as
     XBConnect [www.xbconnect.com] are being used to link LANS over
     arbitrary IP networks. Packets seem to be fixed length proportional
     to number of players. We have some date on 3 and 4 Xbox trials not
     yet on the website.)

Some Quake and Unreal-Tournament packet traces:

 S. K. Joyce, "Traffic on the internet -- a study of internet games,"
  October 2000 http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/wand/publications/sarah-420.ps.gz

QuakeII packet sizes:

 http://gja.space4me.com/things/quake2-pktsize-040600.html (April 2000)

An early look at modeling Quake traffic:

 M. S. Borella. "Source models of network game traffic,"
  Proceedings of networld+interop '99, Las Vegas, NV, May 1999
  http://home.xnet.com/~cathmike/MSB/pubs/game-traffic.ps.Z

cheers,
gja
-- 
Grenville Armitage
http://caia.swin.edu.au
I come from a LAN downunder.