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N. Padilla:
"Perceived Quality of Massive Multiplayer Online Games in Mobile Environments";
Supervisor: P. Svoboda, M. Rupp; Institut für Nachrichtentechnik und Hochfrequenztechnik, 2010.

Today the most important services which have been supported by mobile networks
are phoning, video or data transfer. However, the recent development of new mobile
technologies like Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) or High-
Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), which provide users with broadband mobile
services, has enabled the access to permanent online services on mobile devices.
New applications like online gaming or blogging have entered into mobile networks.
They are strongly in
uenced by networks impairments. This way, there are new
requirements which need to be taken into account in order to improve this kind of
networks and the Quality of Service (QoS) which is perceived by mobile users of these
new real time interactive multimedia services.
One of the most important within these new applications can be said to be
online gaming. There are a lot of online games, like First Person Shooter (FPS) for
fast action, Real Time Strategy (RTS) for slow interaction, and Massive Multiplayer
Online Games (MMOGs) which are actually the most popular. This thesis is focused
on MMOGs, as their particular characteristics and the fact that they have been
proved to have delay sensitiveness, made them interesting from the point of view of
this research.
The main question which has motivated this work is how does the user experience
this application. An answer to this question would allow to determine if MMO gaming
is actually possible in mobile networks with a high QoS, and which factors must be
considered in order to achieve it.
In this direction, the initial step is to develop a test setup which can provide Mean
of Opinion Scores (MOS) results through subjective quality evaluation for MMOG
games. The nal purpose of this work is to propose a MOS metric which allows to
de ne the perceived QoS of MMOGs for given parameters in mobile networks.

Today the most important services which have been supported by mobile networks
are phoning, video or data transfer. However, the recent development of new mobile
technologies like Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) or High-
Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), which provide users with broadband mobile
services, has enabled the access to permanent online services on mobile devices.
New applications like online gaming or blogging have entered into mobile networks.
They are strongly in
uenced by networks impairments. This way, there are new
requirements which need to be taken into account in order to improve this kind of
networks and the Quality of Service (QoS) which is perceived by mobile users of these
new real time interactive multimedia services.
One of the most important within these new applications can be said to be
online gaming. There are a lot of online games, like First Person Shooter (FPS) for
fast action, Real Time Strategy (RTS) for slow interaction, and Massive Multiplayer
Online Games (MMOGs) which are actually the most popular. This thesis is focused
on MMOGs, as their particular characteristics and the fact that they have been
proved to have delay sensitiveness, made them interesting from the point of view of
this research.
The main question which has motivated this work is how does the user experience
this application. An answer to this question would allow to determine if MMO gaming
is actually possible in mobile networks with a high QoS, and which factors must be
considered in order to achieve it.
In this direction, the initial step is to develop a test setup which can provide Mean
of Opinion Scores (MOS) results through subjective quality evaluation for MMOG
games. The nal purpose of this work is to propose a MOS metric which allows to
de ne the perceived QoS of MMOGs for given parameters in mobile networks.

UMTS, QoS, Online Gaming

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_192856.pdf

Project Head Markus Rupp:
Mobilkom