Subject: [tsvwg] draft-saldana-tsvwg-tcmtf for World of Warcraft: 60% bandwidth saving

From: "Jose Saldana" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 12:19:26 +0200

Hi all,

Our research group has just got accepted a paper for a conference next July.
It presents the tests of TCMTF (the "tunnels draft") for the traffic of
World of Warcraft (an online game with 10 million players). This game uses
TCP/IP, and client-to-server headers can be compressed from 40 to 8.72 bytes
average, so this traffic can get a 60% reduction. The cause of these good
results is that the game also generates a high number of TCP ACK packets
without payload (56%). For them, the saving is very high: the compression is
applied to headers, and these packets are "only header". Two other MMORPG
games are also analyzed, and the savings are 40% and 45%. The saving is
lower for server-to-client traffic (8.5%, 22%, 20%).

The number of packets per second can also be reduced: if the traffic of 100
players is multiplexed,  pps can be reduced from 900 to 12.

We have also used a MOS estimator (based on delay and jitter) in order to
grant that subjective quality is not harmed.

I attach two (small) PDF graphs showing the savings.

Since it has not already been published, I have put the paper in my web
page, just in case somebody wants to have a look: 

http://diec.unizar.es/~jsaldana/personal/sergei_SPECTS_2012_in_proc.pdf

Best regards,

Jose Saldana