xbox 360 game performance analysis

[Carter Bullard]

Gentle people,
I am starting a little project to analyze the behavior of an Xbox 360  
while
its doing its multiplayer server/client gaming thing.  Are there any  
gamers
in the group that have an interest in helping to quantify game network
performance?  I personally like games like Call of Duty, and I've  
dabbled
only briefly with Halo 2, so I'm probably not the one to pick the  
game.  If
we do something reasonable, we could take it to one of these mega-gaming
conferences and do some analysis.

Xbox 360 because I have one, but if/when a PS3 is available, we could do
that as well.   If the PS2 has significant network capability, we  
could so
somthing there, if there is a compelling game to analyze.

The main challenge is finding a measurement strategy that is  
meaningful to
the gamer, but also meaningful for the ISP who needs to support a  
level of
QoS to keep the gamer subscriber.  Server availability, RTT and Loss  
statistics,
MTU mismatches, TCP window parameters (assuming TCP is being used) all
have an impact.   Things like peak demand vs availability is pretty  
easy to
measure as long as the game is using trackable protocols, and of  
course if
the game uses multicast, we've got a good monitoring strategy for  
distributed
multicast performance.

Its a pretty good project to think about, or at least to talk about!!!!

Carter