Do nintendo handhelds play nice?: An analysis of its wireless behavior
Pages 87 - 92
Abstract
Nintendo DS handheld game units are popular. They are capable of wireless game play using IEEE 802.11 networks. In this paper, we investigated the local Nintendo wireless game traffic and the effect of this game traffic on other wireless users. We analyzed the wireless traffic generated by up to six players for a number of different games. Our analysis showed that the local wireless traffic differed significantly from wide-area wireless traffic for the same games and hardware. The bit rates used made the small game packets appear large to higher speed networks that shared the wireless channel. Also, Nintendo used a point coordination function (PCF) to arbitrate channel access for local games. Ideally, the contention free slots provided by PCF can provide better quality of service for the game traffic. However, this added extra overhead for the coordination traffic, about 98% of polls for Pictochat produced no game data. Also, this PCF coordination packets were unaware of the coexistence of distributed coordination function (DCF) traffic from typical wireless access points; catastrophically interfering with the wireless traffic of other wireless LAN users.
References
[1]
Cevizci, I., Erol, M., and Oktug, S. F. Analysis of multi-player online game traffic based on self-similarity. In Netgames '05 (Oct. 2006), p. 25.
[2]
Claypool, M. The effect of latency on user performance in real-time strategy games. Comput. Networks 49, 1 (2005), 52--70.
[3]
Claypool, M. On the 802.11 turbulence of nintendo ds and sony psp hand-held network games. In Netgames '05 (Oct. 2005), pp. 1--9.
[4]
Heusse, M., Berger-Sabbatel, F. R. G., and Duda, A. Performance anomaly of 802.11b. In INFOCOM (Mar. 2003), vol. 2, pp. 836--843.
[5]
Howitt, I. Bluetooth performance in the presence of 802.11b wlan. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 51, 6 (Nov. 2002), 1640--1651.
[6]
Jardosh, A. P., Ramachandran, K. N., Almeroth, K. C., and Belding-Royer, E. M. Understanding Congestion in IEEE 802.11b Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (Berkeley, CA, Oct. 2005), pp. 279--292.
[7]
Kim, J., Choi, J., Chang, D., Kwon, T., Choi, Y., and Yuk, E. Traffic characteristics of a massively multi-player online role playing game. In Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games (NetGames '05) (2005), pp. 1--8.
[8]
Lang, T., Branch, P., and Armitage, G. A synthetic traffic model for quake3. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE '04) (2004), pp. 233--238.
[9]
Lan/Man Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Society. Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications. IEEE, 3 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016, 1999.
[10]
Noland, M. A. Inferring a proprietary wireless 13 protocol from packet traces. Tech. rep., UNC Chapel Hill, http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jasleen/Courses/Fall05/projects/wmb_presentation.pdf, Dec. 2005.
[11]
Puget Sound Business Journal. Nintendo game sales stay in front, http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2007/04/16/daily37.html, Apr. 2007.
[12]
Tirumala, A., Qin, F., Dugan, J., Ferguson, J., and Gibbs, K. iPerf: TCP/UDP bandwidth measurement tool, 2.0.2 ed. NLANR, May 2005. http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/.
[13]
Zander, S., and Armitage, G. A traffic model for the xbox game halo 2. In Proceedings of the international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video (NOSSDAV '05) (2005), pp. 13--18.
Recommendations
A survey of QoS enhancements for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN: Research Articles
Quality-of-service (QoS) is a key problem of today's IP networks. Many frameworks (IntServ, DiffServ, MPLS etc.) have been proposed to provide service differentiation in the Internet. At the same time, the Internet is becoming more and more ...
Two-step multipolling MAC protocol for wireless LANs
The IEEE 802.11 standard defines two coordination functions: distributed coordination function (DCF) and point coordination function (PCF). These coordination functions coordinate the shared wireless medium. The PCF uses a centralized polling-based ...
Dynamic Contention Window Control Mechanism to Achieve Fairness between Uplink and Downlink Flows in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs
This paper considers a fairness issue between uplink and downlink flows in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, where uplink flows dominate over downlink flows in terms of wireless bandwidth usage. As a solution to this unfairness, we propose modifying the IEEE ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
Copyright © 2007 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 19 September 2007
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Funding Sources
Conference
NetGames07
Sponsor:
NetGames07: 6th Annual Workshop on Network Systems Support for Games
September 19 - 20, 2007
Melbourne, Australia
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 281Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)5
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in