Smart Access Points on the road for online gaming in vehicular networks

Online games represent one of the most important revenue sources for entertainment based companies and a challenging field in multimedia application research. With vehicular networks poised to become the new wireless frontier of the Internet, car passengers embody the next consumers that will be targeted by online game providers. Yet, the high mobility and heterogeneity of vehicular networks pose serious challenges; previous work on online games demonstrated the importance of the network’s performance in determining the quality level perceived by consumers. A main problem is related to competing heterogeneous network traffic generated by real-time multimedia applications and concurrent bulk data traffic sharing the same access points along the road. Such problem causes low responsiveness in the gaming application and is further exacerbated by the continuous variations in the number and type of flows, due to the cars’ mobility. To this aim, we show how smart access points can be deployed in infrastructure-based vehicular networks to ensure efficient coexistence among heterogeneous types of flow even in presence of frequent network traffic variations due to the vehicles’ high mobility. As a result, delivery delays are kept small, satisfying the main requirement for the deployment of responsive online games.