Routing and Network Coding Over a Cyclic Network for Online Video Gaming

Online video games are getting more popular, attracting a continuously growing number of players. The main performance metrics of this application on the network level are packet ordering, communication throughput, and transmission latency. Nowadays, there is an interest in cyclic logical network topologies for online gaming, due to the easiness to preserve the packet order over cycles. Unfortunately, this approach increases the end-to-end transmission delays. In this letter, two main contributions are therefore presented. First, it is shown that one can improve the latency of a gaming protocol over a single-cycle topology by the network coding (NC) approach. The corresponding NC-based routing protocol has been designed and analyzed; it outperforms the best routing protocol without NC. Second, from the NC viewpoint, the example of online gaming is not a trivial one, given that the corresponding communication protocol is not multicast. Therefore, it is shown that there exists a NC gain (namely, up to 14% in transmission latency) even in case of a mixed communication protocol with broadcast and unicast transmission flows.