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

As real-time multi-player games are increasingly popular network applications nowadays and 802.11 wireless are widely used, it is common that games are played over 802.11 networks. However, game performance can be degraded when competing with background traffic. In this paper, we propose Application Divided Resource Allocation (ADRA) scheme based on 802.11e to support games in a mixed traffic 802.11 environment. Parameter selection and performance improvement are analyzed with our analytic model. Testbed verification validates the effectiveness of our scheme and analysis which provides significant improvements to games performance while sustaining the performance of the background traffic.