Work Hard. Play Hard.

Work Hard. Play Hard. In one of the research projects led by Surendar Chandra, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, it might be hard to tell the difference ... even if you’re watching the students in action. Chandra, along with Adele Fleury and Adam Lusch, two engineering undergraduates working on this independent study, have been collecting information to see how people involved in multi-player games using handhelds, such as Nintendo® DS, impact other wireless users.

Wireless networks are ubiquitous in many organizations and most universities. Gamers create a wireless network among themselves without using, or necessarily requesting, permission from network administrators. So it is important to understand the impact of gamers on the rest of the network, in this case, the Notre Dame campus. 

During their experiments, the team found that Nintendo DS usage had a negligible effect on User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic, one of the core protocols for the Internet. However, interference to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic was dramatic, as throughput for Web users dropped from just over 5 Mbps to between 2 and 3 Mbps, even though the volume of game data was not high. Fleury and Lusch, with the help of fellow undergraduates, such as Vincent Thomas (B.S., CSE ’07, shown here), who took time out of their busy schedules to “play,” found that the Point Coordination Function (PCF) used by Nintendo to arbitrate channel access interacted with the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) of typical wireless access points, causing major interference with the wireless traffic of other local network users.

The team’s findings will be published in a paper titled “Do Nintendo Handhelds Play Nice? An Analysis of Its Wireless Behavior” in the proceedings of the Sixth Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2007). Hosted by the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, NetGames will be held September 19-20, 2008, in Melbourne, Australia.