Experimental Study of an Online Game over Wireless Networks

Online games usually require the delivery of realtime multimedia contents over networks. While online games have become increasingly popular over the Internet, it is still challenging to build online games over wireless networks, where link quality changes from time to time and link capacity is usually much smaller compared to wired networks. Packet losses and large delay of wireless networks may make online gaming an unpleasant experience, especially when a large amount of multimedia traffic is exchanged between players. In this paper, we implement a two-player competitive online game over wireless LAN and test its performance. To reduce the impact of message delay, we introduce a design pattern to deduce the traffic of multimedia contents by coding game context at the application layer instead of transmitting actual multimedia data. Experimental results demonstrate that even with a high bit error rate, the application-layer quality deterioration is negligible for most game players.