First person shooters on the road: Leveraging on APs and VANETs for a quality gaming experience

This work studies the feasibility of using on the road 802.11 Access Points (APs) for the support of First Person Shooter (FPS) games, which are among the online services that exhibit the tightest real-time requirements nowadays. After demonstrating that an acceptable quality of service can be guaranteed, we propose and assess the extension of the AP coverage area by means of vehicular ad-hoc (VANET) communications. The time for which a game can be played in a satisfactory manner can be, in fact, increased exploiting neighboring vehicles, thus improving the general gaming experience. To this aim, we adopted a subjective quality estimator, which reveals whether a game could, or could not, be properly run in a given scenario. Our simulation results show that the AP coverage area can be significantly increased when using other cars as packet forwarders, while maintaining the subjective quality at acceptable levels. All this is performed assessing the feasibility of FPSs on realistic vehicular traffic traces, obtained recording over 100 traversals of an urban road under varying traffic conditions.