Lightweight QoS-support for networked mobile gaming

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for networked mobile gaming. In order to examine the QoS requirements of mobile games, we ported a simple real-time game called GAV (GPL Arcade Volleyball) to a PDA and performed several traffic measurements over both GPRS and UMTS networks. We show that due to high end-to-end delay and delay jitter, realtime games are not supported by GPRS. While UMTS improves both delay and jitter, it still does not match the requirements of real-time games. The key reason for this problem is that overprovisioning, as it is used to allow real-time games in the Internet, is very expensive in mobile networks. At the same time, QoS classes for mobile networks are not tailored to real-time games. In order to reduce delay and jitter for this application class, while still accounting for the very bursty nature of real-time game flows, we propose to use a combination of statistical multiplexing and QoS guarantees. The general idea is to aggregate multiple game flows and perform reservation for that aggregate. As a theoretical background, we use a queuing system based model. Through simulation of a sample network with the traffic data generated by GAV, we validate our assumptions and demonstrate the performance and characteristics of our approach.

Experiences from Implementing a Mobile Multiplayer Real‐Time Game for Wireless Networks with High Latency

“…Busse et al describe experiences from running a ported online game over GPRS and UMTS using the TCP protocol [13]. The game setup consisted of a two-player game where one client ran on a PocketPC PDA and one client ran on the game server.…”

“…Multiplayer online games running over wireless network must cope with latency around 250 ms or more [13]. From the various papers above, we can see that mobile network games like sports and real-time strategy games probably will not give a negative user experience, while others like firstperson shooter and racing games will.…”

Issues related to mobile multiplayer real-time games over wireless networks

“…In [4], Busse et. al describe experiences from running a ported online game over GPRS and UMTS from an quality of service perspective.…”

Applicability of group communication for increased scalability in MMOGs

“…Several architectures based on proxy servers [2,24] or a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture [18,20] have been proposed. Yamamoto presented distributed event delivery to peers [37], and admission control has been proposed presented for a simple, wireless game [5].…”