Network Performance Optimization

The performance and stability of the network is crucial to gaming companies, therefore the network should not be affected by disruptions or outages, which may damage a company’s reputation and market position, or even have an irreversible effect on the business.

Connecting to multiple providers using BGP has become as necessary to game companies’ environments as the use of redundant power sources, multiple data centers or multiple cloud solutions. No business can afford prolonged outages. Today most public clouds or server providers do use BGP.

Unfortunately, BGP has no capability to discover any performance characteristics other than the number of AS’s to be transited for a specific path. From the perspective of network performance, BGP routing chooses the shortest AS path from source to destination and manually configured static preferences. Performance metrics such as packet loss, latency, jitter, throughput, link capacity and congestion, historical reliability and other business characteristics are not addressed by this protocol it therefore has no ability to make routing decisions based on them.

This means that since BGP is focused on reachability and not reliability, traffic may only be rerouted due to hard failures or administrative policy changes.

BGP, as a dynamic routing protocol, is essentially reactive only in cases of total failure which means network performance remains unpredictable as a result of network congestion and blackouts.

Conclusion

For online games, because of their high requirements towards network performance even small degradations will be highly noticeable and considered unplayable for an end-user. 

Since Game-Hosting only offers services to the online games industry we cannot solely rely on BGP. To be able to offer the required performance and stability we have taken a proactive performance-based approach to routing decision making.

Our network automatically determines which traffic needs to be rerouted, evaluates alternative routes based on metrics such us packet loss, latency and jitter, and then announces the best paths for the games to our core network. As a result, it delivers optimized performance and enhanced service availability.