Peer-to-Peer Immersive Voice Communication for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer voice communication scheme, called immersive voice communication (IVC), to provide MMOG players with the immersive experience to hear the voice of neighbor players within the area of interest (AOI). IVC uses a relation model to classify neighbors of a player into the listener and the over hearer, in which the latter consumes much less bandwidth than the former to reduce the traffic load. IVC also adopts the network coordinate system (NCS) to reduce the voice transmission latency and construct an adaptive k-ary tree (AK-tree) to utilize the bandwidth completely. Furthermore, IVC prioritizes voice data and uses voice masking mechanism to reduce the network traffic. As shown by the simulation results, the proposed scheme outperforms other related schemes.