Measurement and analysis of online gaming services on mobile WiMAX networks

Abstract

Online games have been played mainly in desktop computers over wired networks because of high speed and intensive computation requirements. The advances in mobile devices and ever increasing wireless link bandwidth motivate us to study whether players can enjoy online gaming over broadband wireless networks such as mobile Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX). In this paper, we carry out comprehensive measurements of the World of Warcraft (WoW) over the mobile WiMAX in Seoul, Korea, and analyze the network performance focusing on two aspects: (1) network layer dynamics such as round trip time, jitter, and packet loss and (2) WiMAX link layer statistics such as the radio signal strength, handovers, and piggyback mechanism. From the empirical data, we set up performance models and evaluate the performance of WoW over WiMAX. We also discuss how to improve the service quality of online gaming over WiMAX. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEYWORDSonline gaming service; mobile WiMAX; measurement *CorrespondenceHyun-chul Kim, Department of Computer Software Engineering, Sangmyung University, Cheonan, Korea. E-mail: hyunchulk@gmail.com Ted "Taekyoung" Kwon, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. E-mail: tkkwon@snu.ac.krOver the last decade, the online games have become one of the most popular and profitable applications on the Internet. So far, people have enjoyed various gaming experiences in virtual worlds mostly over the wired Internet, which offers stable connection with short delays and small jitter. Recently, more and more people choose to play games via wireless and mobile networks [1,2], which has opened the new era of online entertainment services of the Internet. Over the recent few years, Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) network based on the IEEE 802.16(e) standard [3] has gained substantial attention as an IP-based wireless access technology for mobile users. As mobile WiMAX supports handovers (HOs) and mobility management, which potentially provides continuous IP-compatible Internet services, more and more mobile users are likely to use it to play online games, particularly in a bus or metro [4].The world's first successful WiMAX network was deployed and commercialized in Seoul, Korea, by Korea Telecom (KT) in 2006, being referred to as Wireless Broadband (WiBro) [5]. WiBro, the Korean version of WiMAX † , operates at 2.3 GHz bands with a 10 MHz channel bandwidth, adopting time division duplex between downlink and uplink [5]. For flexible bandwidth allocation among users, the orthogonal frequency division multiple access is employed for multiple access. A base station (BS) offers an aggregate throughput of 30 to 50 Mbps theoretically and covers a radius of 1 to 5 km, supporting mobility up to 120 km/h [6]. To keep the continuous Internet connectivity, when a subscriber station (SS) moves across the boundaries between cells, the SS performs an HO that incurs processing delay, which potentially impairs th...

A mirroring architecture for sophisticated mobile games using computation‐offloading

“…The basic goal of this work is a system able to run a game whose computational load is partitioned across a game client and an offloading server, which is essentially running an additional instance of the game. Because mobile devices encounter periods of network unavailability, the game should still be playable without offloading (part of main requirement R1, in the end‐section summary). When a part of the computational workload is to be offloaded (R2), the client skips the computation and instead relies on results computed and then sent back by the server.…”