This article discusses the benefits of using the Dynamic Route for Content Delivery Network through the lens of the mobile game provider, Lilith Games.
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By CDN Team
Lilith Games is a Shanghai-based mobile game provider that devotes itself to creating fun games for worldwide players and sticks to the core strategies of "globalization" and "category evolution." Through the deep understanding of the global market and category development stages, Lilith Games introduced Chinese mobile games, such as "Allstar Heroes," "Rise of Kingdoms," and "AFK Arena" to the world.
Lilith Games was listed on LinkedIn's Top Companies and KPMG's Top 50 Leading Chinese Cross-Border Brands in 2019. From January to April 2020, Lilith Games topped the list of China-headquartered apps by worldwide consumer spending from overseas.
Business Difficulties
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Poor Dynamic Command in the Game: Players are from various cities and provinces in China, and the game carriers also vary in size and quality. Therefore, the complicated network environment will lead to serious latency and network fluctuations, especially when the transmission is operated in cross-network and cross-region scenarios. This is the main reason players fail to send their dynamic command in time, which affects their operation in the game.
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Decreased Game Performance: A rapid increase of players logging on within a short time may cause network congestion and network quality fluctuations. This may result in packet loss and affect the content delivery of the game, lessening players' experience.
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Complex and Insecure Self-Built Acceleration Procedures: The improvement of player interaction depends on the quality of nodes and infrastructure in the transmission acceleration network. In addition, route selection and protocol optimization need to be customized. All of these are complex for self-built acceleration procedures. In order to achieve such functionality, you would require a certain level of detection capability on devices as well as intelligent routing strategies. Furthermore, the core link of self-built procedures is vulnerable to network attacks, leading to link instability and interruption. Thus, the business may be significantly affected by these problems.
Solutions
An Architecture Diagram of Solutions
First, Alibaba Cloud reduced the latency of dynamic command in the game.
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The Deployment of High-Quality Asset Nodes: Alibaba Cloud's Dynamic Route for CDN (DCDN) provides a large number of asset nodes that cover all internet service providers (ISPs) from different cities, provinces, and regions in China so players can access the closest nodes. Moreover, the DCDN also ensured stable connections with low latency and solved the issues caused by transmission between different regions and different ISPs.
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Intelligent Routing for Latency Minimization: Alibaba Cloud's DCDN uses global detection to collect transmission latency data from nodes in real-time. By adjusting the router based on the dynamic information of asset nodes, Alibaba Cloud's DCDN minimized the latency of dynamic game instructions and online interactions.
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Protocol Optimization: Alibaba Cloud's DCDN uses its proprietary transfer protocol. Compared with the traditional Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), it has been optimized for solving the issues caused by the slow start mechanism, congestion control, and data retransmission. Also, the transfer protocol makes full use of bandwidth resources. By doing so, the efficiency of data transmission is further improved.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud improved the stability of game operations.
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Intelligent Routing for Minimizing the Packet Loss Rate: Alibaba Cloud's DCDN uses global detection to obtain transmission packet loss data between nodes in real-time. By adjusting the router based on the dynamic information of asset nodes, Alibaba Cloud's DCDN ensured the stable transmission of dynamic game instructions and online interactions.
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Multi-Channel Transmission: With multi-channel transmission, Alibaba Cloud's DCDN replicates the data of dynamic game instructions and online interactions and transmits the data through multiple channels. Compared with the single-channel transmission, this technology minimizes network fluctuations.
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Zero-Latency Switchover: Alibaba Cloud's DCDN quickly switches over services with zero latency to make sure that players can still play the game normally when the node failure occurs on the platform. Through the zero-latency switchover, the stability of the platform is guaranteed.
Moreover, Alibaba Cloud enhanced the compatibility and security of the platform:
- Based on the Alibaba Cloud's Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure, internal protocol optimization, and intelligent routing system, Alibaba Cloud's DCDN greatly improved its transmission rate and usability, especially in a poor network environment. DCDN supports the transparent retransmission of customers' business to protect their privacy without attacks. More specifically, with some simple changes to the origin server, Alibaba Cloud's DCDN can obtain the IP addresses of customers. The distributed deployment of nodes can protect the service against attacks as well.
Customer Benefits
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Enhanced User Experience: Alibaba Cloud's DCDN minimizes network latency and improves user experience.
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Cost Reduction: Alibaba Cloud's DCDN allows users to replace all Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network resources of their origin servers with a single operation network. This reduces the bandwidth costs of origin servers by more than 50%.
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Flexibility and Security: Characterized by easy access and privacy protection, Alibaba Cloud's DCDN supports transparent retransmission and has 4 to 7 protection layers. Thus, customers do not have to worry about the attacks from DDoS and web applications.
Conclusion
Through Alibaba Cloud's Dynamic Route for Content Delivery Network (DCDN), Lilith Games improved players' interactive experience in the games, saving the cost of origin server bandwidth by more than 50% and eliminating attacks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and Web applications.
With technologies of static and dynamic separation, edge caching, intelligent routing, compression transmission, the DCDN can solve many issues, such as slow response, packet loss, and unstable service, caused by multiple carriers, network instability, single-line origin server, burst traffic, and network congestion. By doing so, it can improve the acceleration performance and access experience of dynamic and static mixing and pure dynamic sites or Apps.
Learn more about Alibaba Cloud DCDN
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