MicroPlay: a networking framework for local multiplayer games

Smartphones are an ideal platform for local multiplayer games, thanks to their computational and networking capabilities as well as their popularity and portability. However, existing game engines do not exploit the locality of players to improve game latency. In this paper, we propose MicroPlay, a complete networking framework for local multiplayer mobile games. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework that exploits local connections between smartphones, and in particular, the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, to provide smooth, accurate rendering of all players with two desired properties. First, it performs direct-input rendering (i.e., without any inter- or extrapolation of game state) for all players; second, it provides very low game latency. We implement a MicroPlay prototype on Android phones, as well as an example multiplayer car racing game, called Racer, in order to demonstrate MicroPlay's capabilities. Our experiments show that cars can be rendered smoothly, without any prediction of state, and with only 20-30 ms game latency.