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Dynamic Content Delivery Network:Sword and Expedition published by Lilith Games: accelerates the delivery of dynamic content to enhance user experience

Last Updated:Dec 15, 2023

The mobile game, Sword and Expedition, published by Lilith Games uses Alibaba Cloud Dynamic Route for CDN (DCDN) to accelerate dynamic content delivery and optimize the user experience. DCDN is used to reduce the latency of dynamic instructions, improve the stability of game operation, and enhance the compatibility and security of the gaming platform.

Customer profile

Shanghai Lilith Technology Corporation (Lilith Games) is devoted to developing the most engaging mobile games and creating an unprecedented gaming experience for players around the world. Lilith Games adheres to the core strategies of globalization and category evolution. Based on the in-depth analysis of the global market and the stage of category development, Lilith Games is expanding its international market share. Lilith Games has launched several popular games, including Sword and Expedition, Xiaobingbing Legend, and Awakening of All Nations.

Lilith Games got on to the list of 2019 LinkedIn Top Companies and was listed in the 50 leading Chinese cross-border brands released by KPMG in the same year. From January to April 2020, Lilith Games was at the top of the list that is released by App Annie , which includes Chinese game companies with leading overseas revenues.

Challenges

The following list shows the challenges faced by Lilith Games before using DCDN:

  • Player input latency: Players are widely distributed across different provinces, cities and regions inside Mainland China. The networks gamers are located in exhibit complex conditions and are managed by operators of different sizes. When data transmission crosses networks and regions, significant latency and network fluctuations often cause player's dynamic game instructions not issued in a timely manner, affecting the player experience.

  • Game smoothness degraded: When online gamers increase dramatically in a short period of time, network fluctuation and congestion can cause packet loss during data transmission. This will lead to the transmission of packets. This negatively affects the game display effect, greatly reduces the player's game experience.

  • Self-built acceleration links are complex and insecure: The improvement of player interaction latency depends on the quality of nodes and infrastructure in the transmission acceleration network. Routing and protocol optimization also require custom development, which is very complex for self-built acceleration links and requires terminal's detection of link quality and intelligent routing strategy. At the same time, the core link is vulnerable to network attacks, resulting in link instability and even interruption, which has a great impact on business.

Solutions

DCDN can be used to solve the preceding challenges.

Figure 1. Architecture of DCDN IP Application Accelerator (IPA)Architecture of DCDN IPA

  • Proprietary protocols are used to control the transmission between edge nodes and L2 nodes. This ensures high availability, and stabilizes efficient transmission.

  • The intelligent routing system is used to identify the optimal paths from users to an origin server within the network. This further improves the service availability and transmission rate.

Benefits

  • Reduce the player input latency:

    • Optimized deployment of high-quality nodes: DCDN provides a large number of nodes that support ISPs in different provinces, cities, and regions in mainland China. Players can access the closest nodes to them and ensure stable connections with low latency. DCDN solves network bottlenecks encountered by long-distance connections across regions and different ISPs.

    • Intelligent routing to minimize the latency: DCDN uses global detection to collect transmission latency data from nodes in real time. This allows DCDN to dynamically adjust the routing rules based on node conditions. You can use this feature to minimize the latency of player inputs and online interactions.

    • Protocol optimization: DCDN uses a proprietary transmission protocol that is developed by Alibaba Cloud. Compared with traditional TCP-based communication, the optimized protocol can solve the issues caused by the slow start mechanism, congestion control, and data retransmission. This allows you to make full use of bandwidth resources and further enhance data transmission efficiency.

  • Improve the stability of game operations:

    • Intelligent routing to minimize the packet loss rate: DCDN uses global detection to obtain packet loss data between nodes in real time. This allows DCDN to dynamically adjust the routing rules based on node conditions. You can use this feature to ensure stable processing of dynamic game instructions through transmission paths.

    • Multipath transmission: DCDN replicates the data of dynamic game instructions and user interactions and concurrently transmit the data through several paths. Compared with single-path transmission from a single data source, transmission over multiple paths allows you to minimize network jitter.

    • Automatic and immediate failover: DCDN enables automatic failover with no delay to ensure smooth user experience if a fault occurs. This allows game players to enjoy smooth game experience.

  • Enhance service compatibility and security:

    DCDN is developed based on the Alibaba Cloud CDN infrastructure, protocol optimization, and intelligent routing system. You can use DCDN to maximize the throughput and service availability, especially in areas exhibiting poor network conditions. IPA uses a proxy to forward client requests without any changes to the packets. This protects the privacy of client's communication. Simple configurations on the origin server can allow you to obtain client IP addresses. Distributed deployment of nodes can protect the service against attacks.

Customer values

  • Optimized user experience: DCDN minimizes network latency and improves user experience.

  • Cost reduction: If your origin server uses multiple uplinks, DCDN allows you to change it to use a single uplink. This reduces the bandwidth costs of origin servers by more than 50%.

  • Flexibility and security: You can use DCDN to accelerate your applications based on simple configurations. Client requests are forwarded to your origin severs without any changes to the packets. DCDN provides security protections against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and web application attacks.

Related service

DCDN

DCDN is developed based on multiple technologies, including separated acceleration techniques for dynamic and static content, edge caching, intelligent routing, and data compression before transmission. This service provides an all-purpose solution to resolve issues like high latency, packet loss, and service instability. They can be caused by factors like cross-ISP connections, unreliable networks, origin site with single uplink, bursty traffic, and network congestion. You can use DCDN to improve the overall performance of your website and accelerate content delivery to improve user experience.

For more information, see Product page of DCDN.