Workload characterization in multiplayer online games

In recent years, distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have become a major trend in distributed applications, mainly due to the enormous popularity of multiplayer online games in the entertainment industry. Although the workload generated by avatars in a DVE system has already been characterized, the special features of multiplayer online games make these applications to require a particular workload characterization. This paper presents the workload characterization of multiplayer online games. This characterization is based on real traces, and it shows that the movement patterns of avatars used to develop optimization techniques for DVE systems can be extrapolated to First Person Shooting networked games. However, the workload that each avatar adds to the game server is higher than the one proposed in the literature.