Matchmaking for Online Games and Other Latency-Sensitive P2P Systems

Overview

The latency between machines on the Internet can dramatically affect users' experience for many distributed applications. Particularly, in multiplayer online games, players seek to cluster themselves so that those in the same session have low latency to each other. A system that predicts latencies between machine pairs allows such matchmaking to consider many more machine pairs than can be probed in a scalable fashion while users are waiting. Using a far-reaching trace of latencies between players on over 3.5 million game consoles, the paper designed Htrae, a latency prediction system for game matchmaking scenarios. One novel feature of Htrae is its synthesis of geolocation with a network coordinate system.