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Dissecting the Protocol and Network Traffic of the Onlive Cloud Gaming

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Dissecting the Protocol and Network Traffic of the Onlive Cloud Gaming Multimedia Systems manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Dissecting the Protocol and Network Traffic of the OnLive Cloud Gaming Platform M. Manzano · M. Urue~na · M. Suˇznjevi´c E. Calle · J. A. Hern´andez · M. Matijasevic Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract Cloud gaming is a new paradigm that is en- 1 Introduction visaged to play a pivotal role in the video game in- dustry in forthcoming years. Cloud gaming, or gam- Although these days the traffic generated by networked ing on demand, is a type of online gaming that al- gaming (i.e., by video game platforms such as PC, Xbox lows on-demand streaming of game content onto non- 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii) only represents specialised devices (e.g., PC, smart TV, etc.). This ap- 0.03% (77 PB) of total Internet traffic, it is expected proach requires no downloads or game installation be- to experience a 52% Compounded Annual Grouth Rate cause the actual game is executed on the game com- (CAGR) by 2016 [9], and become the Internet's traffic pany's server and is streamed directly to the client. segment with the greatest expansion in the upcoming Nonetheless, this revolutionary approach significantly future. Online gaming brings players from all over the affects the network load generated by online games. As world together for fun and entertainment, and is re- cloud gaming presents new challenges for both network garded as one of the most profitable and popular Inter- engineers and the research community, both groups need net services. As a consequence, the video games busi- to be fully conversant with these new cloud gaming ness is expected to increase from $60.4 billion in 2009 platforms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate to $70.1 billion in 2015 [14]. OnLive, one of the most popular cloud gaming plat- In a broader context, there is a growing trend to- forms. Our key contributions are: (a) a review of the wards moving local applications to remote data cen- state-of-the-art of cloud gaming; (b) reverse engineer- ters: this paradigm is referred to as the cloud. This new ing of the OnLive protocol; and (c) a synthetic traffic computing paradigm provides benefits such as: (a) a de- model for OnLive. crease in hardware and software requirements for clients (enabling so-called thin clients). Users no longer need to install programs locally and carry out periodic updates, Keywords Cloud gaming · Online games · OnLive · administration or maintenance tasks on their comput- Protocol · Reverse engineering · Traffic modelling ers; (b) users may access their files, e-mail, music, and movies from any device (e.g., PC, smartphone, tablet, M. Manzano and E. Calle smart TV, etc.) any time, anywhere; and (c) develop- Institute of Informatics and Applications (IIiA), University ers do not need to devote resources to adapting their of Girona, Spain software to different hardware platforms. E-mail: fmmanzano,[email protected] Many types of services taking advantage of the cloud M. Urue~naand J. A. Hern´andez have appeared in recent years: cloud storage (e.g., Drop- Dept. of Telematic Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de box, Google Drive), music-on-demand (e.g., Spotify, Pan- Madrid, Spain E-mail: fmuruenya,[email protected] dora), video-on-demand (e.g., Youzee, Netflix), docu- ment editing and spreadsheets (e.g., Google Docs) and, M. Suˇznjevi´cand M. Matijasevic Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing,, University more recently, cloud gaming (e.g., OnLive, Gaikai). of Zagreb, Croatia From a network perspective, the cloud paradigm has E-mail: fmirko.suznjevic,[email protected] a direct impact on network load [47]. The traffic require- 2 M. Manzano et al. ment of cloud games in comparison to standard games tising specific flows (e.g., audio) within a cloud gaming may increase by two orders of magnitude. To illustrate service. this point, World of Warcraft, a popular online game, Traffic management systems require a comprehen- has a bandwidth requirement in the vicinity of 55 kbps sive knowledge of traffic properties. Therefore, cloud in the most demanding situations [40], while OnLive gaming traffic, as a relatively new type of service, should can require up to 5.6 Mbps [29]. While cloud comput- be measured, and appropriate analyses should be made, ing reduces client hardware requirements, it may sig- so that the traffic properties are identified and under- nificantly increase network requirements to secure good stood. Furthermore, as deep packet inspection is very Quality of Experience (QoE) of said services, as many of sensitive to privacy issues, and port and IP based traffic them are traffic-intensive. In fact, some business mod- classification is not that accurate anymore, traffic clas- els like Spotify greatly rely on the performance of the sifiers are relying heavily on the statistical properties network [17]: premium users require higher network ca- of the traffic. Traffic models and synthetic traffic can pabilities than free users because they receive higher be used to both design and test such traffic classifica- quality streams. tion systems. In addition, analytical traffic models and traffic generators based on these are invaluable tools In this paper we focus on the OnLive cloud gam- in both network operation and planning. Any network ing platform. At the time of writing, there are only a simulation, emulation or testing in both real and emu- few cloud gaming service platforms available (among lated environments is futile without good traffic models. them OnLive, Gaikai, GamingAnywhere, GameString, The usability of traffic models in testing procedures is G-cluster, Otoy, StreamMyGame, t5 labs, and iTSMY), not just limited to network infrastructure, but is also with some of them still being under development. In- valuable to the research community in the development terestingly, Gaikai was recently purchased by Sony for and testing of new protocols, QoE studies, simulations, USD $380 million [43], and the mere fact that some of etc. the most influential video game companies are now in- As different games may have very distinct game play vesting in cloud gaming would suggest that this new mechanics and therefore traffic characteristics, traffic technology is positioned to take a considerable market models need to be simple and general enough to encom- share of the video game industry. In theory, if all of the pass multiple games. Therefore, in this paper we com- \traditional" networked games were to be replaced with pare and model two games at the boundaries of feasible cloud-based games, game-related traffic would take sec- traffic characteristics (i.e., games with the highest and ond place in the overall traffic load of the Internet; be- lowest bandwidth requirement). Also, as cloud gaming hind Internet video, but surpassing the file sharing and traffic is very complex and comprises of diverse types of web-related traffic categories. information (e.g., user actions, video, audio, etc.) in the In this light, network providers must be au fait with modelling process it is very important to identify those this new service which is one of the most demanding traffic properties which are game dependent or not, or real-time services, both in bandwidth requirements (as whether some flows have constant or variable bit rate, we will show in following sections), as well as in delay and so on. In this fashion, inspection of other games requirements. This is because there is no computation is significantly simplified as some traffic characteristics of the virtual world state on the client side, nor are are only platform-dependent. there mechanisms for dealing with increased latency or Previously mentioned methods should be applicable packet loss on the client-side, or the so-called client side for cloud gaming services in general. Therefore, a com- prediction (e.g., dead reckoning). Therefore, network re- parison of different cloud gaming services is essential to quirements of cloud games are even greater than those obtain the characteristics which are not platform spe- of \regular" games. Network providers will only be able cific, but rather are common to the whole cloud gam- to handle this new service by upgrading their infrastruc- ing paradigm. For instance, when comparing the video tures to provide access technologies capable of dealing flows of two cloud gaming providers, the first step is with the stringent network requirements of cloud gam- to understand the protocols employed and the different ing (as well as other cloud-based services), because cur- traffic patterns generated. As the protocols employed rent access technologies (i.e., 802.11g, ADSL, DOCSIS) are most often proprietary, the only approach is to may no longer be suitable to deliver high-quality cloud reverse-engineer them. In this paper we take a first step services. Additionally, to enhance the QoE of end users, towards such a comparison of cloud gaming services by network providers may prioritise cloud gaming flows analysing and reverse-engineering the OnLive protocol. over other non real-time flows through traffic manage- In our previous work [29], we carried out a traffic ment mechanisms, or even fine grain control, by priori- measurement comparison between OnLive and Gaikai Dissecting the Protocol and Network Traffic of the OnLive Cloud Gaming Platform 3 and concluded that there are several significant differ- Internet, and would appear to be a remarkable oppor- ences between the two platforms. However, to the best tunity for the video game industry. The authors of [22] of our knowledge, there are no previous works focusing have defined four requirements for cloud-based gaming on the specific protocols used by these cloud gaming services: platforms. As a consequence, we have focused our work { User responsiveness: to guarantee suitable respon- on conducting a reverse engineering study on OnLive, siveness, interaction in the games should be kept leaving Gaikai for future study.
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