Transition-enabled event dissemination for pervasive mobile multiplayer games

Today's smartphones feature sophisticated computational capabilities as well as a plethora of sensors, enabling new kinds of applications. One popular example are pervasive mobile multiplayer games, where interactions with other users or physical objects in the real world are part of the gameplay. This induces a notion of locality, as a user's actions affect other nearby users. However, this locality in the interaction is not reflected in the underlying communication system. Events triggered by users are sent via the cellular connection to a remote data center, where they are processed and then distributed to other players, again via the cellular link. In this work, we demonstrate an event dissemination system that utilizes the available local communication interfaces of today's smartphones to distribute events in groups of nearby players. The system executes transitions between different communication interfaces (e.g., Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct) and the utilized dissemination protocol depending on the size and density of the group of players, thereby exploiting the characteristics of the chosen interface. Attendees can experience the resulting benefits in terms of latency and update frequency by playing our mobile pervasive multiplayer game TowerWorld at the venue.