A Non-Elevated Scheduling Solution for First Person Shooter Games in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Abstract

First person shooter (FPS) games are a popular online gaming genre played predominately over wired networks. FPS games are highly interactive and have stringent delay requirements. However, the explosive growth in wireless LAN (WLAN) deployment has seen an increase in the use of such networks for gaming purposes. The varied performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) has tended to make WLANs unsuitable for FPS games. The IEEE 802.11e standard introduces quality of service (QoS) mechanisms including enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) allowing prioritization of competing flows. Using the NS-2 simulator, we evaluate the capability of 802.11g and 802.11e WLANs to support Quake IV games traffic in the presence of web traffic. We compare the results achieved using EDCA with those achieved by a non-elevated differentiated services scheduler known as Best Effort with loss trade-off (BELT) that differentiates at the IP layer. We find that the BELT scheduler compares favorably with EDCA in this context.