On the 802.11 Turbulence of Nintendo DS and Sony PSP Hand-held Network Games

Mark Claypool, On the 802.11 turbulence of nintendo DS and sony PSP hand-held network games. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Network and System Support for Games (NetGames) 2005.

With the growth hand-held game consoles that support multi-player gaming over IEEE 802.11 networks, it has become important to understand the traffic chearacteristics of network games in order to build traffic models and adequately planning wireless network infrastructures to meet future demand. This study provides early answers to the following questions:

• What is the network turbulence for hand-held network games?: Answer: Hand-held network games make frequent sends of small frames of data, typical of network games on other platforms.
• Does the network turbulence for different hand-helds (such as the PSP and the DS) differ from each other?: The characteristics of Nintendo DS game traffic is different than that of the Sony PSP game traffic.
• Does the network turbulence for different games (such as Ridge Racer and Super Mario on the same handheld differ from each other?: Games on the Nintendo DS have network characteristics fairly similar to each other, while games on the Sony PSP vary considerably from game to game.
• Does the network turbulence for hand-held games differ from PC games?: The hand-helds send game data in sizes comparable to that of PC or console games, but hand-helds send data more frequently.

Does hand-held game traffic interfere with traditional Internet traffic on the same wireless channel?: In some cases, hand-held games can have adverse affects on the throughput for applications sharing the same WLAN channel.

Relation to my thesis: A very engineering-based study of wireless networks turbulence to build traffic models. It has some similarities with User-perceived Quality of Service in Wireless Data Networks. In distributed location-aware applications, Wireless network quality has a direct impact on location timeliness. This study suggests that wireless applications have different network characteristics. I could imagine changing the application traffic models to change according to the environment and the user’s activity in order to understand how people cope with turbulences impacting location timeliness.