Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed resource sharing approach for mobile multiplayer online games, leveraging device cooperation to overcome connectivity and resource constraints, enabling new gaming scenarios and workload distribution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fully distributed resource sharing framework for mobile MOGs, facilitating workload distribution and enabling new game deployment scenarios.

Findings

Resource sharing improves game performance.

Distributed approach enables workload distribution.

Promotes new mobile online gaming scenarios.

Abstract

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.