Multiplayer games over wireless ad hoc networks: Energy and delay analysis

With the tremendous popularity of network-based multiplayer games and the development of wireless technologies, we believe that future game consoles will benefit from supporting MANET (mobile ad-hoc networks) mode. However, many issues still have to be addressed. Indeed, multiparty games are very sensitive to resource availability. They are very demanding on CPU and thus, high consuming on energy. In addition, the game play could experience a significant degradation caused by delays variability, which is typically the case in MANET. In order to provide a better understanding of these problems, we address in this paper the routing issue for time sensitive multiparty games, like First Person shooter gender, in wireless ad hoc network environments´. To this end, we evaluate through realistic experimentations and using objective metrics the energy consumption and the Quality of Gaming experience for two OLSR versions: 1) the original one and 2) an energy enhanced version of OLSR. The performance analysis is conducted considering two metrics: 1) a network level metric, namely network life duration and 2) a game application level, namely the gameplay.