Routing and Network Coding over a Cyclic Network for Online Video Gaming

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that network coding can significantly reduce latency in cyclic network topologies for online gaming, outperforming traditional routing protocols and providing gains even with mixed broadcast and unicast flows.

Contribution

It introduces a network coding-based routing protocol for cyclic networks that improves latency and analyzes its effectiveness in non-multicast gaming communication scenarios.

Findings

Network coding reduces latency by up to 14%.

The proposed protocol outperforms non-NC routing protocols.

NC provides benefits even with mixed broadcast and unicast flows.

Abstract

Online video games are getting more popular, attracting a continuously growing number of players. The main performance metrics of this application on the network level are packet ordering, communication throughput and transmission latency. Nowadays there is an interest in cyclic logical network topologies for online gaming, due to the easiness to preserve the packet order over cycles.Unfortunately, this approach increases the end-to-end transmission delays. In our paper, two main contributions are therefore presented. Firstly, it is shown that one can improve the latency of a gaming protocol over a single-cycle topology by the network coding (NC) approach. The corresponding NC-based routing protocol has been designed and analysed; it outperforms the best routing protocol without NC. Secondly, from the NC viewpoint, the example of online gaming is not a trivial one, given that the corresponding communication protocol is not multicast. Therefore, it is shown that there exists a NC gain (namely, up to 14% in transmission latency) even in case of a mixed communication protocol with broadcast and unicast transmission flows.