Minimising Disruption Caused by Online FPS Game Server Discovery in a Wireless Network

A key part of First Person Shooter network gaming is the game server discovery phase. Whilst probing for suitable servers from a wireless network, a large burst of network traffic is generated, potentially leading to detrimental effects on network capacity available to other wireless users. This can be minimised using an optimised algorithm to order the discovery probes and subsequently terminate the discovery process early. In this paper we explore further modifications to a previously proposed algorithm and examine its efficacy in further reducing the probe time/traffic during the server discovery phase. We show that it is possible to further reduce the overall discovery process duration by up to 13% while still presenting all suitable servers to the user for selection.