ChoiceNet gaming: Changing the gaming experience with economics

When playing online games, the user experience is often dictated by the performance of the network. To deliver the best possible gaming experience, game developers often find themselves developing work-arounds that try to mask the lack of control they have over of the existing TCP/IP Internet. ChoiceNet, an emerging future Internet architecture, attempts to give applications enhanced control (choice) over the service they receive from the network. In particular, ChoiceNet supports an economic plane in which applications can purchase services from any provider. Because providers are compensated, they are motivated to offer a variety of innovative, excellent services, enabling applications to select the service best suited for its needs. Instead of coding work-arounds, game developers can obtain precisely the network service that is needed to optimize the game experience. In this paper, we describe the emerging ChoiceNet architecture and show how computer games can benefit from the alternatives enabled by ChoiceNet. To demonstrate the benefits of the ChoiceNet architecture, we implemented a first person shooter game that uses ChoiceNet to 'purchase' and then send data over the purchased path resulting in substantially lower latency than the default path. We describe the ChoiceNet services used to implement the game, and we present performance results that show a significant reduction in latency. We also show how ChoiceNet can be used to purchase reliable (non-lossy) communication paths that improve the user's experience.