Edge Security Acceleration:AFK Arena by Lilith Games: Accelerate dynamic content delivery for better user experience

Customer profile

Shanghai Lilith Technology Corporation (Lilith Games) is devoted to developing engaging mobile games and creating an unprecedented gaming experience for players around the world. Lilith Games adheres to the core strategies of globalization and categorized development. Based on the in-depth analysis of the global market and categorized development prospects, Lilith Games is expanding its international market share. Lilith Games has launched a number of popular games, including AFK Arena, Soul Hunter, and Rise of Kingdoms.

Lilith Games ranked among the list of 2019 LinkedIn Top Companies and was also listed in the 50 leading Chinese going-global brands released by KPMG in the same year. From January to April 2020, Lilith Games had topped the list released by App Annie that includes Chinese game companies with leading overseas revenues.

Challenges

• Player input latency: Given that players are distributed across different provinces, cities, and regions in the Chinese mainland, it is challenging to deliver seamless game content across multiple Internet service providers (ISPs). Network conditions are complex during game acceleration. Data transmission across regions and ISPs can lead to increased latency and fluctuating network quality. This causes delay to dynamic game instructions and downgrades user experience.

• Decreased smoothness of game content delivery: A rapid increase of online players within a short time period may cause network congestion and increase network quality fluctuations. This may result in packet loss and affect content delivery and user experience.

• Complex and insecure self-built acceleration networks: To reduce the player interaction latency when acceleration networks are used, the quality of points of presence (POPs) and infrastructure must be improved. Customized routing, protocol optimization methods, device health checks, and smart routing policies are also required.

Solution

Benefits

• Reduced player input latency:

  • Optimized deployment of high-quality POPs: DCDN provides a large number of POPs that support ISPs from different provinces, cities, and regions in the Chinese mainland. Players can access the closest POPs to them. This ensures stable connections with low latency. DCDN addresses network bottlenecks caused by communication across regions and ISPs.

  • Smart routing to minimize the latency: DCDN collects transmission latency between POPs in real time and adjusts the routes based on POP 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 resolve 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.

• Improved stability of game operations:

  • Smart routing to minimize the packet loss rate: DCDN uses global detection to obtain packet loss data between POPs in real time and dynamically adjusts the routing rules based on POP conditions. You can use this feature to ensure stable processing of dynamic game instructions and interactions.

  • Multi-channel transmission: DCDN replicates the data of dynamic game instructions and interactions to multiple channels and concurrently transmits the data through these channels. Compared with single-channel transmission from a single data source, multi-channel transmission allows you to minimize network jitter.

  • Seamless failover: DCDN enables seamless failovers to ensure smooth user experience if a POP fails. This allows game players to enjoy stable service performance.

• Enhanced service compatibility and security:

  DCDN is developed based on the Alibaba Cloud CDN infrastructure, protocol optimization, and smart routing system. You can use DCDN to maximize the data transmission rate and service availability, especially in poor network conditions. IPA uses a transparent proxy to forward client requests, which protects the privacy of clients. Simple configurations on the origin server can allow you to obtain client IP addresses. Distributed deployment of POPs can protect the service against attacks.

Customer values

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

• Cost reduction: DCDN allows the customer to deploy all Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network resources of the origin server over a single acceleration network. This reduces the bandwidth costs of origin servers by more than 50%.

• Flexibility and security: DCDN is easy to configure and protects applications against DDoS attacks and web application attacks. Client requests are forwarded to the origin server without any changes to the packets.

Related service

DCDN

DCDN employs technologies such as separated acceleration for dynamic and static content, edge caching, smart routing, and compression during transmission to resolve the challenges of high latency, packet loss, and service instability. These challenges may arise if your website content is delivered across ISPs, your network is unstable, a network congestion happens, only one origin server is used, or network traffic spikes. In such cases, you can use DCDN to improve the overall performance of your website and accelerate content delivery to improve user experience.

For more information, visit the DCDN product page.