Empirical Evaluation of Streamed Online Gaming over WiMAX

Online gaming is one of the main Internet services holding potential for a significant growth. Currently, much attention is paid on studying how high-quality 3D games with varying resource demands can be played over the Internet streamed real-time from a remote game server. This enables end-users to play high-quality games without need for having very powerful game machines as most of the processing is performed already in the game server. This type of gaming is sensitive to network conditions, especially, to end-to-end delays of both uplink and downlink. In this study, we evaluate the quality of streamed online gaming over fixed WiMAX through empirical evidence. We evaluate the gaming quality with various background traffic loads and types in scenarios where a WiMAX link is employed as a backhaul connection. In addition, we assess the importance of various WiMAX QoS scheduling schemes to keep the gaming experience high despite the congestion in the serving base station. We find that the quality of streamed gaming is very sensitive to delays and already the characteristic transmission latencies of WiMAX are near the edge of a smooth gaming experience. With heavy traffic loads, inflicting high delays, the gaming experience faces a radical degradation, which can be clearly mitigated by using scheduling schemes privileging the game traffic.