Capability of IEEE 802.11g networks in supporting multi-player online games

Multi-player online games have become very pop- ular in the last few years. Meanwhile, the IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have been in wide use. In this paper, we present an experimental study on the capability of an IEEE 802.11g network in supporting multi-player online games. In particular, we focus on the highly interactive first-person-shooter games. We describe the test bed we set up and the experiments we performed. Factors such as the number of game clients and the amount of background traffic are examined. Our results show that the amount of background traffic has a significant impact on the latency and the loss ratio of the game traffic between the game clients and the game server, which in turn affect the observed game performance greatly. I. INTRODUCTION