A Ns2 model for the Xbox System Link game Halo

This paper presents traffic analyses for Xbox System Link traffic. The goal of this analyses is to create a traffic model for Xbox traffic that can be used for network evaluation purposes. Traffic characteristics observed were: packet length, packet inter-arrival times, packets per second (PPS) and data rates. We found that System Link traffic is very periodic. Servers send update packets every 40 ms to all clients. Clients transmit two types of packets to the server. One every 40 ms and the other one every 201 ms. Server to Client PPS was 25 and Client to Server PPS 30 for all experiments. Packet lengths depend on the number of players participating in a game. Based on these observations a simple ns2 simulation model for Server and Client Xboxes was developed.