For this assignment, we needed to do use tools to investigate our own local internet system. What I did, was use the tool Wireshark in order to see what packets I am receiving while playing Final Fantasy 14. I am a fan of MMORPGS and I was wondering what protocol of information was being sent and the length of the packets themselves.
Over a course of a couple days, I decided to open Wireshark and record the packets being received while I played. I would play in the environment that I usually do, while being in a voicecall in discord, my internet browser open, and just had at it.
A question remains though, which is: How do you know which packets are your games?. That's a good question. At first, I thought I had it down, but then realized I was looking the receiving destination instead of source. I used the Final Fantasy XIV data center service to obtain the IP address, and then preceded to look at my data. One thing that I realized is that I couldn't find it. The closest matching ip was off by the last address by 4. This led me to believe that the ip address may change due to changing servers? But I cannot be completely sure about that. I also realized that the protocol that I received was TCP instead of UDP. I was always under the assumption that games would use UDP in order to handle desynchronization issues and allow the game to keep going, as the user might lag and you just want to send the packets through regardless (which is what I was taught back in 2013 when I was in an online fighting game community). However, that was not the case. What I DID notice though, was that the one that was under UDP protocol was the voicecall, which made sense. (I obtained the IP of the Discord call before leaving the chat, as Discord has a tendency to change IP Address of where the call is hosted).
One of the things that I want to do is create an average of the LENGTH of the packets distributed by IP Address vs amount of packets. This is to see how much data on average is being sent to my computer, and to see which services consume the most internet.