Can a Wi-Fi WLAN Support a First Person Shooter?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the feasibility of supporting real-time first-person shooter game traffic over Wi-Fi WLANs, demonstrating acceptable quality during handoffs and suggesting resource management improvements.

Contribution

It presents experimental evidence that Wi-Fi WLANs can support online gaming with acceptable quality, and proposes considering gamer presence in resource management.

Findings

Acceptable game quality maintained during handoffs

Virtual APs enable transparent Layer 3 handoffs

Gamer presence can inform resource management algorithms

Abstract

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.