Measurement and analysis of online gaming services on mobile WiMAX networks

Online games have been played mainly in desktop computers over wired networks because of high speed and intensive computation requirements. The advances in mobile devices and ever increasing wireless link bandwidth motivate us to study whether players can enjoy online gaming over broadband wireless networks such as mobile Worldwide Inter‐operability for Microwave Access (WiMAX). In this paper, we carry out comprehensive measurements of the World of Warcraft (WoW) over the mobile WiMAX in Seoul, Korea, and analyze the network performance focusing on two aspects: (1) network layer dynamics such as round trip time, jitter, and packet loss and (2) WiMAX link layer statistics such as the radio signal strength, handovers, and piggyback mechanism. From the empirical data, we set up performance models and evaluate the performance of WoW over WiMAX. We also discuss how to improve the service quality of online gaming over WiMAX.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In this paper, we carry out comprehensive measurement of the online gaming service (World of Warcraft) via mobile WiMAX in Seoul, Korea, and analyze the performance from two aspects: (1) network layer dynamics such as RTT, jitter, and packet loss and (2) link layer statistics such as signal strength, handovers, and piggyback mechanism. From the empirical data, we set up performance models for evaluation, and we also discuss how to improve the service quality of online gaming over WiMAX.