Applying Compression to a Game's Network Protocol

TL;DR

This paper evaluates various compression algorithms applied to an online game's network protocol, demonstrating that adaptive coding effectively compresses small packets, with practical performance insights from TomeNET.

Contribution

It compares multiple compression algorithms, including a novel adaptive Huffman-based method, for optimizing game network traffic.

Findings

Adaptive coding excels at compressing small packets.

The study provides performance data from TomeNET.

Different algorithms have distinct advantages depending on packet size.

Abstract

This report presents the results of applying different compression algorithms to the network protocol of an online game. The algorithm implementations compared are zlib, liblzma and my own implementation based on LZ77 and a variation of adaptive Huffman coding. The comparison data was collected from the game TomeNET. The results show that adaptive coding is especially useful for compressing large amounts of very small packets.