Reducing the Impact of Massive Multiplayer Online Games on the Internet Using SCTP

Abstract

Games are on the Internet to stay. Their popularity and use are growing every day, and some genres such as the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) have become an important source of network traffic having several thousands of simultaneous players at any one time. These kinds of games constitute a real challenge for developers but also for Internet service providers due to their high requirements of bandwidth and hardware resources. Therefore, it is really important for MMORPGs to be supported by high-performance network code. We show how these games can benefit from the new transport protocol in the TCP/IP stack, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) which can increase the overall efficiency of a game protocol in terms of latency and jitter, along with extra savings in processing time for packet management. Both of these are important details for player's game experience and for server resource provisioning, respectively.