Lightweight QoS-support for networked mobile gaming

In this paper, we present an approach to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for networked mobile gaming. In order to examine the QoS requirements of mobile games, we ported a simple real-time game called GAV (GPL Arcade Volleyball) to a PDA and performed several traffic measurements over both GPRS and UMTS networks. We show that due to high end-to-end delay and delay jitter, realtime games are not supported by GPRS. While UMTS improves both delay and jitter, it still does not match the requirements of real-time games. The key reason for this problem is that overprovisioning, as it is used to allow real-time games in the Internet, is very expensive in mobile networks. At the same time, QoS classes for mobile networks are not tailored to real-time games. In order to reduce delay and jitter for this application class, while still accounting for the very bursty nature of real-time game flows, we propose to use a combination of statistical multiplexing and QoS guarantees. The general idea ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NETGAMES
• Authors: Marcel Busse, Bernd Lamparter, Martin Mauve, Wolfgang Effelsberg
• Keywords: Mobile Gaming, Mobile Networks, NETGAMES 2004, Real-time Game