The revolution of StarCraft network traffic

Abstract

StarCraft II uses a client-server architecture while StarCraft I uses a peer-to-peer architecture. StarCraft I clients utilize more outgoing bandwidth for each additional player in the game, while StarCraft II clients maintain constant client-to-server bandwidth regardless of the number of players. StarCraft I and StarCraft II exhibit distinct packet size and inter-packet size distributions. For StarCraft II, we model inter-packet time distributions for both client-to-server and server-to-client traffic regardless of the number of players. The packet size distribution for client-to-server traffic also remains constant regardless of the number of players while the packet size distribution for server-to-client traffic shifts with regard to the number of players. We segmented each of these distributions, and fit each segment with a uniform, beta, gamma or triangular distribution, constructing the model for StarCraft II network traffic.