GamingAnywhere: An Open Cloud Gaming System Chun-Ying Huang1, Cheng-Hsin Hsu2, Yu-Chun Chang3,4, and Kuan-Ta Chen3 1Department of Computer Science, National Taiwan Ocean University 2Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University 3Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica 4Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University
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[email protected] ABSTRACT market research [11] further breaks down the market growth Cloud gaming is a promising application of the rapidly ex- into three categories: boxed-games, online-sold games, and panding cloud computing infrastructure. Existing cloud cloud games. Cloud gaming systems render the game scenes gaming systems, however, are closed-source with proprietary on cloud servers and stream the encoded game scenes to thin protocols, which raises the bars to setting up testbeds for clients over broadband networks. The control events, from experiencing cloud games. In this paper, we present a com- mice, keyboards, joysticks, and touchscreens are transmit- plete cloud gaming system, called GamingAnywhere, which ted from the thin clients back to the cloud servers. Among is to the best of our knowledge the first open cloud gam- the three categories, it is the cloud games market that is ing system. In addition to its openness, we design Gaming- expected to expand the most: nine times over the period of Anywhere for high extensibility, portability, and reconfigura- 2011 to 2017, at which time it is forecast to reach 8 billion bility. We implement GamingAnywhere on Windows, Linux, US dollars [11]. and OS X, while its client can be readily ported to other Cloud gaming systems attract both users and game de- OS’s, including iOS and Android.