Latency Thresholds for Usability in Games: A Survey

User interactions in interactive applications are time critical operations;late response will degrade the experience. Sensitivity to delay doeshowever vary greatly with between games. This paper surveys existingliterature on the specifics of this limitation. We find a classificationwhere games are grouped with others of roughly the same requirements.In addition we find some numbers on how long latency is acceptable.These numbers are however inconsistent between studies, indicatinginconsistent methodology or insufficient classification of games andinteractions. To improve classification, we suggest some changes.In general, research is too sparse to draw any strong or statisticallysignificant conclusions. In some of the most time critical games, latencyseems to degrade the experience at about 50 ms

Can a Wi-Fi WLAN support a first person shooter?

In corporate and commercial environments, the deployment of a set of coordinated Wi-Fi APs is becoming a common solution to provide Internet coverage to moving users. In these scenarios, real-time services as online games can also be present. This paper presents a set of experiments developed in a test scenario where an end device moves between different APs while generating game traffic. A WLAN solution based on virtual APs is used, in order to make the handoffs transparent for Layer 3. The results show that it is possible to maintain an acceptable level of subjective quality during the handoff. At the same time, it is set clear that the fact of having a gamer in an AP could be taken into account by radio resource management algorithms, in order to provide a better quality

Latency and player actions in online games

The growth and penetration of broadband access networks to the home has fueled the growth of online games played over the Internet. As we write this article, it is 5am on a typical weekday morning and Gamespy Arcade 1 reports more than 250,000 players online playing about 75,000 games! This proliferation of online games has been matched by an equivalent growth in both th

Multipath and Rate Stability

Originally Published In Proc. IEEE Globecom Conference - CQRM: Communication QoS, Reliability & Modeling Symposiu

On The Study of Establishing a Responsive Infrastructure for a Massively Multiplayer On-Line Game

A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) often requires a game publisher to deploy dozens or hundreds of n-tiered servers to support millions of concurrent players around the world. Planning such a massive network infrastructure, particularly in an environment where uncertain demand and limited server capacity could cause congestions in a host site and the network, poses a great challenge. A slow response time stemming from an ill-designed infrastructure could render an otherwise technically superior MMOG noncompetitive in the marketplace. In this study, we focus on three critical issues related to establishing an MMOG server infrastructure: selecting host facilities on a broadband provider’s backbone network nodes, assigning client clusters represented by the Point of Presences (PoPs) to these MMOG facilities, and determining the required capacity for each host site. The problem is first formulated as a non-linear integer program based on an M/M/1 queuing system in each host facility. We then develop an exact solution approach obtained from solving a minimum cost set-covering problem. The efficiency of the solution approach is also reported

Modeling ping times in first person shooter games

In First Person Shooter (FPS) games the Round Trip Time (RTT), i.e., the sum of the network delay from client to server and the network delay from server to client, impacts the game

On the feasibility of using current data centre infrastructure for latency-sensitive applications

It has been claimed that the deployment of fog and edge computing infrastructure is a necessity to make high-performance cloud-based applications a possibility. However, there are a large number of middle-ground latency-sensitive applications such as online gaming, interactive photo editing and multimedia conferencing that require servers deployed closer to users than in globally centralised clouds but do not necessarily need the extreme low-latency provided by a new infrastructure of micro data centres located at the network edge, e.g., in base stations and ISP Points of Presence. In this paper we analyse a snapshot of today's data centres and the distribution of users around the globe and conclude that existing infrastructure provides a sufficiently distributed platform for middle-ground applications requiring a response time of $20\hbox{-}200$20-200 ms. However, while placement and selection of edge servers for extreme low-latency applications is a relatively straightforward matter of choosing the closest, providing a high quality of experience for middle-ground latency applications that use the more widespread distribution of today's data centres, as we advocate in this paper, raises new management challenges to develop algorithms for optimising the placement of and the per-request selection between replicated service instances