In this paper, Petlund et al. describe a publicly available tcpdump trace from a live production massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) called Anarchy Online. MMOG traffic differs from the more common streaming traffic of websites, videos, and torrents, in that the packets are very small and less frequent. Hence, traces of this type expose different features and limitations of existing transport protocols.

The Anarchy Online trace is contrasted with other published traces that have been described in the literature, and is shown to be similar in form. The major difference is that this trace has been anonymized and made available online.

Researchers developing packet routers or transport protocols will be interested in this trace as it provides real data. However, the trace itself is on the small side with only one hour’s worth of data; nonetheless, it is representative of this unique form of communication.