A system for improving the performance of on-demand mobile communications services includes a wireless network having a plurality of mobile devices and an application server. A relay node receives data from a first mobile device, the data having a destination address associated with the application server. The relay node is adapted to detect a service flag in the received data and route the received data to a second mobile device in accordance with stored routing rules. The received data may be transmitted using the UDP protocol, including error correction code for important data to guarantee packet delivery. A client device may be further adapted to track the duration of idle communications periods during operation of a client application, and transmit a dummy packet to the gaming server when the duration exceed a predetermined threshold to prevent the relinquishment of allocated system resources.