Delay Impact on Gaming Experience, For a First Person Shooter Game.

Sammanfattning: The growing market for online games and their significant share in the internet traffic has allured researchers to investigate the factors affecting the game playing experience of the end user. In this work an investigation has been done on how one-way delay affects the First Person Shooter game there by Quality of Experience of the player. The data that is analyzed was collected at Dream Hack Winter-2007 by Telecommunications research team of Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. It consisted of 57 experiments conducted using Battle-Field2 game in a controlled LAN, with between 2 and 4 players. The network was monitored using Distributed Passive Measurement Infrastructure. This thesis implemented tools to generate accurate delay plots for each relevant stream in the captured game traffic traces. The delay plots have been ensured by identifying what IP that was disturbed and when the disturbance occurred in the trace, as per the shaper settings. Then the investigation is mainly concentrated on the analysis of one-way delay and how it affects the end-user Quality of Experience. As a part of this work we also looked at the affect of packet delay variation on end user's perception, delay distribution of the shaper and packet length distribution of the client - server and server - client packets. Conclusions were made by stating that one-way delay and packet delay variation has considerable impact on end users perception. It is found that the delay of 400 ms is threshold delay value to get a good user response and packet delay variations of 100 ms and 200 ms with variable amounts of delay are detectable by the player.