Game
Environments Internet
Utilisation Study (GENIUS)
Introduction
GENIUS began in
2002 with the aim of
characterizing the impact of
popular
online, interactive, real-time games on ISP networks. The program has
since expanded to encompass questions about latency tolerance of
players, network layer mechanisms for cheat-mitigation, the hidden
network-layer impact of server discovery protocols, synthetic
construction of realistic game traffic simulations, passive real-time
detection of live game traffic in ISP access networks, and the use of
3D game engines for interactive visualisation of network activity.
Background
Interactive,
real-time online games
represent a rapidly growing market
and a challenge for ISPs. The market for computer games is reported to
have exceeded Hollywood's annual
revenues in the past few years, and PC-based computer games have
accelerated the industry's
development of high-end graphics cards and sound systems in
consumer-level computers. There are new revenue (or customer retention)
opportunities for ISPs
who can offer premium services targetted at online game players.
However, there remains the
challenge of
efficiently engineering ISP
networks to support online, interactive
computer games. In an ideal world with excess funding an ISP could
simply over-provision their entire network. But the real world demands
that new online game players must be supported on existing links -
shared with everyone else's web surfing, file sharing, and email
traffic.
Network engineering is a balancing act. A proactive ISP tries to
maintain packet latency, loss, and throughput expectations of its
customers by adapting their internal resources to the offered load.
As part of this project we will develop and release
tools to assist in
data gathering and analysis, and publish
interim
results and papers on
our website. The links above will take you to additional
information.
GENIUS has
also
spawned the SONG, ANGEL, L3DGE and BITSS
projects here at
CAIA.
CAIA Lab Maps
If you are curious how our lab looks like, here are playable Quake3 maps of our current and previous lab.
Program
Leader
Grenville
Armitage
Program Members
Sebastian
Zander
Warren
Harrop
Lawrence
Stewart
Phillip
Branch
Tony Cricenti
Chris Holman
(Alumni: Carl Javier, Brandon Tyo, David Kennedy, Mark
Pozzobon,
Ian Leeder, Tanja Lang, Ana Pavlicic)
