Supporting First Person Shooter Games in Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

First Person Shooter (FPS) games are a popular online gaming genre played predominately over wired networks. FPS games have stringent delay requirements. However, the explosive growth in wireless LAN (WLAN) deployment has seen an increase in the use of such networks for gaming purposes. The varied performance of the IEEE 802.11 standard has tended to make WLANs unsuitable for FPS games. The IEEE 802.11e enhancement introduces Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms including Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) allowing prioritization of competing flows. Using the NS-2 simulator, we evaluate the capability of 802.11 WLANs to support Quake IV games traffic in the presence of web traffic. We compare the results achieved using EDCA with those achieved by a non-elevated differentiated services scheduler known as Best Effort with Loss Trade-off (BELT). We find that the BELT scheduler compares favorably with EDCA in this context.

Minimising Disruption Caused by Online FPS Game Server Discovery in a Wireless Network

“…Much prior work on running FPS games in a wireless environment has centred on how well wireless networks cope with network traffic generated by the online games, how that traffic inteferes with other wireless network users, and how scheduling schemes could improve the performance for game traffic [1], [2], [10]. Their results show that as long as the number of concurrent players is not too high, wireless networks can successfully run FPS games.…”

“…Amongst the online activities subscribed to users is online gaming. As the performance of wireless networks improves, increasing numbers of users will migrate to playing online games using wireless technology [1], [2].…”

“…First Person Shooter (FPS) games are amongst those with the most dependence on network performance in terms of delay and jitter [3]. There exists prior work in evaluating the performance of FPS games over wireless networks, but these examine the performance during gameplay [1], [2]. What is often not considered is how network game traffic behaves during the server discovery phase [4].…”

Supporting first person shooter games with competing traffic in 802.11e MAC

“…Related works include [3], [4] and [5]. [3] propose a scheme at the IP-layer rather than a MAC-layer to support games in WLAN.…”

“…[3] propose a scheme at the IP-layer rather than a MAC-layer to support games in WLAN. [5] measures the capability of 802.11g for multiplayer online games.…”