Do nintendo handhelds play nice?: An analysis of its wireless behavior

ABSTRACT

Nintendo DS handheld game units are popular. They are capable of wireless game play using IEEE 802.11 networks. In this paper, we investigated the local Nintendo wireless game traffic and the effect of this game traffic on other wireless users. We analyzed the wireless traffic generated by up to six players for a number of different games. Our analysis showed that the local wireless traffic differed significantly from wide-area wireless traffic for the same games and hardware. The bit rates used made the small game packets appear large to higher speed networks that shared the wireless channel. Also, Nintendo used a point coordination function (PCF) to arbitrate channel access for local games. Ideally, the contention free slots provided by PCF can provide better quality of service for the game traffic. However, this added extra overhead for the coordination traffic, about 98% of polls for Pictochat produced no game data. Also, this PCF coordination packets were unaware of the coexistence of distributed coordination function (DCF) traffic from typical wireless access points; catastrophically interfering with the wireless traffic of other wireless LAN users.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
IEEE 802.11 wireless, distributed coordination function (DCF), nintendo DS, point coordination function (PCF)