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QoE and Latency Issues in Networked Games

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Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies

Abstract

The rise of the Internet opened new possibilities for computer games, allowing real-time interaction between players in different parts of the world. Online games permit a number of people to compete in a shared virtual world. However, the synchronization and the maintaining of a coherent game state to be shared by the applications of all the players is not a trivial problem: different sources of latency appear and may cause inconsistencies between the game states observed by each of the players. Different genres of online games present specific latency requirements, depending on the game dynamics, its characteristics, and the level of interaction between the players. This chapter discusses the different mechanisms that companies use in order to overcome the problem of network latency when providing online games: the use of low-bandwidth traffic flows, the different protocols used at transport level, the architectures employed, the distribution of the hardware resources, the mechanisms for hiding the effect of the network to the players, etc. In addition, the different techniques used for estimating the user’s Quality of Experience from network parameters are surveyed. Although latency is the most important parameter, other ones such as packet loss, delay variation (jitter), or bandwidth are also considered. Different QoE-enhancing mechanisms, such as client-side prediction or server delay compensation, are summarized. Other scalability-related techniques are also explained.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Communications EINA, Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A), University of Zaragoza, Ada Byron Building, D. 2.05., 50018, Zaragoza, Spain

    Jose Saldana

  2. Department of Telecommunications, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska 3, HR-10000, Zagreb, Croatia

    Mirko Suznjevic

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  1. Jose Saldana
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  2. Mirko Suznjevic
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Correspondence to Jose Saldana .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Design School, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Ryohei Nakatsu

  2. Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Matthias Rauterberg

  3. Dipto. Scienze dell'Informazione, Università di Bologna , Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Ciancarini

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Saldana, J., Suznjevic, M. (2017). QoE and Latency Issues in Networked Games. In: Nakatsu, R., Rauterberg, M., Ciancarini, P. (eds) Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-50-4_23

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