Online Games on Wheels: Fast Game Event Delivery in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

With a number of participants that is continuously growing in number, the online game market is demonstrating its revenue potentialities. From a research point of view, online games embody a very interesting topic especially when plunged into extremely challenging scenarios such as vehicular networks. Indeed, regardless of the very high and fast mobility of vehicles, inter-vehicular communications are soon going to become a reality thanks also to the ongoing development of the IEEE 802.11p/DSRC standard. Car passengers will soon ask for utilizing all their favorite networking applications, including online games, even when traveling. To this aim, we consider the case study of a group of vehicles traveling along the same road while passengers are engaged in a shared online game through multi-hop wireless communications. As interactivity is one of the most important properties of online games, we have designed a novel scheme that is able to reduce the number of hops, and thus the time, required to broadcast every game event to all other players in the considered vehicular network. The main component of our scheme is a transmission range estimator, which is exploited to prioritize farther vehicles in becoming the next forwarder of a game event.