Assessment of MANET broadcast schemes in the application context of multiplayer video games

Taking into consideration the popularity of multiplayer games and the tremendous success of wireless networks, we strongly believe that future game engines will benefit from the integration of MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks) technology [1]. Indeed, in addition to the social interests of playing with close located persons, MANET technology will allow players, like a group of kids in a playground, to easily improvise a LAN multiplayer party without any need for an existing wireless network infrastructure. In order to make such scenario a common based reality, several issues still have to be addressed. Among which is the MANET's broadcast problem. In fact, broadcast is a fundamental network service for multiplayer LAN mode. But up to now, the most used scheme for broadcasting in MANET relies on flooding. Unfortunately, this simple scheme leads to high redundancy and collisions. In the context of a multiplayer party supported by mobile terminals, this broadcast storm problem [10], could result into a dramatic reduction of the network energy-based lifetime and to a high variability of the transmission delay. The latter one is know to be a crucial QoS parameter which can significantly affect the game play. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of different MANET broadcast schemes in the context of multiplayer video games. We analyze the capacity of simple flooding, distance based, probability based and self pruning broadcast schemes to satisfy the QoS constraints required by multiplayer games like FPS. Assessment simulations are conducted for both Client/Server and P2P network game architectures.