  Online video games are getting more popular, attracting a continuously
growing number of players. The main performance metrics of this application on
the network level are packet ordering, communication throughput and
transmission latency. Nowadays there is an interest in cyclic logical network
topologies for online gaming, due to the easiness to preserve the packet order
over cycles.Unfortunately, this approach increases the end-to-end transmission
delays. In our paper, two main contributions are therefore presented. Firstly,
it is shown that one can improve the latency of a gaming protocol over a
single-cycle topology by the network coding (NC) approach. The corresponding
NC-based routing protocol has been designed and analysed; it outperforms the
best routing protocol without NC. Secondly, from the NC viewpoint, the example
of online gaming is not a trivial one, given that the corresponding
communication protocol is not multicast. Therefore, it is shown that there
exists a NC gain (namely, up to 14% in transmission latency) even in case of a
mixed communication protocol with broadcast and unicast transmission flows.
