Perceived Quality of Massive Multiplayer Online Games in Mobile Environments

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 HighSpeed 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 influenced 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 final purpose of this work is to propose a MOS metric which allows to define the perceived QoS of MMOGs for given parameters in mobile networks.