Mobile Multiplayer Gaming

                This paper aims to collect and analyze statistical data on U.S. gamer populations. In recent years, the gaming industry has exploded. The revenue from the gaming industry amounted to 7 billion dollars in the U.S. alone.  Surprisingly the average purchaser of games is 40 years old. About 69 percent of heads of households in the U.S. play some form of computer game.

                There are two dominant demographics for any gaming genre, casual and hardcore. They are distinct in that casual players spend a fraction of their spare time gaming whereas hardcore gamers spend most of their spare time playing. Hardcore gamers represent only about a fourth of the gaming population. While they are not the largest source of revenue for the gaming industry, in the case of online games, they contribute most to the spread of a game’s reputation via forum participation. This is not the case with the emerging mobile gaming market where most games are popularized by word of mouth.

                The author conducted a study to analyze the potential of the various technologies available for multiplayer gaming. He concluded that UMTS/WCDMA, with its coverage of 80% of the EU population would be the most likely candidate for future developments. With its low packet loss and latency, and the ability for providers to vary quality of service based on subscription, this technology seems ideal for mobile gaming.

                It seems that with the expanding capabilities of mobile networks those providers are seeking to take a share of the pc market. UMTS/WCDMA networks are apparently empty of traffic, due to the low general requirements of mobile use. They are capitalizing on this fact and have begun disseminating UMTS/WCDMA routers in the hopes that pc gamers will begin to utilize the same resources as mobile platforms.  The author’s study concluded that these technologies would be suitable for genres such as RTS and MMORPG’s, but FPS’s are slightly out of scope. There are also issues with scaling based on the number of players in a game. These issues may be remedied; the emerging HSPDA offers substantially better latencies rendering some of these hurdles obsolete.

 

http://web.it.kth.se/~maguire/DEGREE-PROJECT-REPORTS/070624-Christian_Westermark-thesis-with-cover.pdf

Supporting RealTime Applications in Mobile Mesh Networks

 This paper concerns the organizational framework that is needed for the effective use of wireless ad-hoc networks. More specifically, the authors address the details of service lookup and provision. They have provided as an experimental solution, SIRAMON, a generic, decentralized service provisioning framework for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs).

The authors begin with a description of the problem they are addressing. Current techniques for service provision do not account for the conditions in a MANET. Firstly, they typically address only on a subset of the functionality required for resource provision. Also, they typically rely on a client-server model that uses a central, fixed infrastructure. This is not an available luxury in a mesh network. In a MANET the framework must be able to account for a high level of device heterogeneity, and limited device resources.

SIRAMON has modularized each of the service provisioning phases to allow for the easy alteration of the middleware. In this manner application, or environment specific functions may replace those currently implemented if there is a perceived benefit. SIRAMON utilizes a hierarchical service identifier tree. Specific services are depicted as leaf nodes. Actual service descriptors are implemented with XML. Service labels are composed of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). For example
siramon://Service/Entertainment/Games/Multiplayer/RealTime/DeathMatch 
would describe a service located by SIRAMON called DeathMatch which would have its own XML descriptors. Using this URI, they are able to allow users to do complete and partial lookups. For example a search for RealTime games might also return other results found in Multiplayer.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.lib-ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5643647