The computer game industry is clearly growing in the direction of multiplayer, online games. Understanding the demands of games on IP (Internet Protocol) networks is essential for ISP (Internet Service Provider) engineers to develop appropriate IP services. Correspondingly, knowledge of the underlying network's capabilities is vital for game developers.

Networking and Online Games concisely draws together and illustrates the overlapping and interacting technical concerns of these sectors. The text explains the principles behind modern multiplayer communication systems and the...

Video streaming has become increasingly popular with commercial video streaming applications such as YouTube accounting for a large quantity of Internet traffic. While streaming video is sensitive to bandwidth jitter, a receiver buffer can ameliorate the effects of jitter by adjusting to the difference between the transmission rate and the playback rate. Unfortunately, there are few studies to determine the best size of the receiver buffer for TCP streaming. In this work, we investigate how the buffer size of video streaming applications changes with respect to variation in bandwidth. We...