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In this paper we attempt to gain an understanding of the behaviour of users in a multipoint, interactive communication scenario. In particular, we wish to understand the dynamics of user participation at a session level. We present wide-area session level traces of the popular multiplayer networked games Quake and Half-Life. These traces were gathered by regularly polling 2256 game servers located all over the Internet, and querying the number of players present at each server and how long they had been playing. We analyse three specific features of the data: the number of players in a game, the interarrival times between players and the length of a player's session. We find significant time-of-day and network externality effects in the number of players. Player duration times fit an exponential distribution, while interarrival times fit a heavy-tailed distribution. The implications of our findings are discussed in the context of provisioning and charging for network quality of service for multipoint and multicast transmission. This work is ongoing.
Henderson et al. (Mon,) studied this question.