What’s Behind ‘Sorry, I Lagged’: Correlating Wi-Fi Metrics with Online Gaming Latency

Online gaming is one of the most popular services via Wi-Fi at home, requiring stable, low latency to ensure responsive gameplay. Although recent versions of Wi-Fi offer maximum theoretical bitrates up to 9.6 Gbps, far exceeding throughput requirements for online games, players still experience frustrating moments due to poor Wi-Fi connections during the game. Among other challenges, Wi-Fi is particularly sensitive to its radio environment due to its unlicensed spectrum. In addition to interferences from neighboring Wi-Fi networks in crowded areas, other radio technologies such as Bluetooth, Thread and microwave ovens that share the same frequency as Wi-Fi can also have non-desirable effect for Wi-Fi services. In this paper, we focus on how Wi-Fi coverage and neighboring interference can impact the gaming experience of a well-known multiplayer online game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. We conducted gaming experiments and collected metrics from a Wi-Fi access point and gaming device in a controlled and automated Wi-Fi testbed with different attenuation values and available airtime on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands. Our analysis identifies strong correlations between in-game latency and specific WiFi metrics for each frequency band. This study helps better understand the impact of Wi-Fi quality on in-game latency, and could guide Internet Service Providers and telecommunication operators on diagnostics and future network design.