BYTE.com > Features > 2007
Games Online Bring Bandwidth Down
By Nicolas Mokhoff
January 8, 2007
(Games Online Bring Bandwidth Down
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As CES celebrated its 40th year last week, gaming was front and center with Intel and Microsoft Xbox leading the way. The two companies sponsored the World Series of Video Games (WSVG), a video game competition circuit on multiple gaming platforms, spanning eight simultaneous three-to-five day events that were open to the public. Other CES activities only open to industry participants.
But online gaming needs no venue except the seat of a PC or a TV. And, it is going to eat up a great deal of bandwidth and needs to compete with IPTV and VoIP as another bandwidth-hungry application clogging the Internet.
Nielsen Entertainment market research firm found that 56 percent of the 117 million "active gamers" in the U.S. play games online. The "Active Gamer Benchmark Study" also confirmed that gamers want more of a social experience when playing games.
The likes of IBM and Intel are studying how to optimize the use of broadband technologies to make the most pleasant experience not only for gamers but also for regular users of digital services who share the bandwidth with the game enthusiasts. Intel is experimenting with Verizon in online gaming.
Gaming is Serious Business
IBM has a research project for developing an on demand service platform for games. The aim is to investigate the opportunity for developing a multiplexed infrastructure across business applications and games, for example to better utilize servers and bandwidth during idle periods.
Real-time requirements of online games, in contrast to traditional Web-based applications, demand very low latency and high responsiveness from the server and network infrastructure. The research has led to applying predictive provisioning. Their predictive models can use game workload patterns to deploy game servers slightly in advance to further improve the perceived provisioning delay.
The IBM researchers, led by Anees Shaikh, Manager, systems and network services at the IBM Research Center, analyzed workload data collected over more than a year for different games.
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