Content scheduling in multimedia interactive mobile games

Abstract

In this paper, we study how to implement interactive multimedia services using a DVB-H broadcast channel combined with a point-to-point channel, such as 3G or GPRS. We study the problem in the context of a location-based interactive mobile game. The technical challenge is to schedule the sending of data over the broadcast channel while maintaining Quality-of-Service, that is, sending the right data to the right user at the right time to provide a seamless interactive experience. We explore design issues and problems related to the scheduling of content in the game, present a usecase study to describe scheduling problems and propose a content scheduling algorithm to solve these problems. Moreover, we provide a simulation of the system and the experimental results to show how different game parameters infuence the in-time delivery of the multimedia content to the players. We conclude that most of the problems involved with our approach can be expressed as the problem of defining delivery deadlines for a scheduling algorithm.