Quake 3 packet and traffic characteristics

This preliminary investigation of Quake 3 in-game network traffic aims to report upon the inter-packet arrival times, packet size distributions, packet per second rates and server/client data rates. Traffic characteristics of network games such as Quake 3 are particularly useful to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who are interested in identifying such applications utilising their resources. The results of this investigation will form the basis for further research into player sensitivity to jitter and latency. A game sequence is generally conducted as follows: 1. Player joins, 2. Game is quiet for a few seconds, 3. Map loads, 4. Interactive-phase (in-game), 5. Game ends, 6. Short pause, 7. Repeat from step 3. until player leaves. Although the joining, leaving and idle phases of networking gaming are important to any game play, the most interesting and crucial part of the game cycle is the traffic during the interactive phase. In the results of this investigation we have attempted to eliminate histograms containing traffic of idle clients.