A Survey on Cloud Gaming: Future of Computer Games

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

A Survey on Cloud Gaming: Future of Computer Games Received May 30, 2016, accepted June 13, 2016, date of publication August 8, 2016, date of current version November 18, 2016. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2590500 A Survey on Cloud Gaming: Future of Computer Games WEI CAI1, (Member, IEEE), RYAN SHEA2, (Member, IEEE), CHUN-YING HUANG3, (Member, IEEE), KUAN-TA CHEN4, (Senior Member, IEEE), JIANGCHUAN LIU2, (Senior Member, IEEE), VICTOR C. M. LEUNG1, (Fellow, IEEE), AND CHENG-HSIN HSU5, (Senior Member, IEEE) 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada 2School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada 3Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan 4Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan 5Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan Corresponding author: C.-H. Hsu ([email protected]) This work was supported in part by the University of British Columbia through the Four Year Doctoral Fellowship, in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under Grant STPGP 447524, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61271182, in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under Grant 102-2221-E-007-062-MY3, Grant 103-2221-E-009-230-MY2, Grant 104-2221-E-009-200-MY3, and Grant 103-2221-E-001-023-MY2, in part by an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, in part by an NSERC Strategic Project Grant, and in part by a Discovery Grant. ABSTRACT Cloud gaming is a new way to deliver high-quality gaming experience to gamers anywhere and anytime. In cloud gaming, sophisticated game software runs on powerful servers in data centers, rendered game scenes are streamed to gamers over the Internet in real time, and the gamers use light-weight software executed on heterogeneous devices to interact with the games. Due to the proliferation of high-speed networks and cloud computing, cloud gaming has attracted tremendous attentions in both the academia and industry since late 2000's. In this paper, we survey the latest cloud gaming research from different aspects, spanning over cloud gaming platforms, optimization techniques, and commercial cloud gaming services. The readers will gain the overview of cloud gaming research and get familiar with the recent developments in this area. INDEX TERMS Clouds, distributed computing, video coding, quality of service, computer graphics. I. INTRODUCTION all implemented as parts of the cloud gaming platform. Cloud gaming refers to a new way to deliver computer As shown in this figure, the cloud gaming platform sends the games to users, where computationally complex games are video frames to, and receives user inputs from thin clients executed on powerful cloud servers, the rendered game used by gamers for playing games. It is a thin client, because scenes are streamed over the Internet to gamers with thin only two low-complexity components are required: (i) com- clients on heterogeneous devices, and the control events from mand receiver, which connects to the game controllers, such input devices are sent back to cloud servers for interactions. as gampads, joysticks, keyboards, and mouses, and (ii) video Figure 1 presents how cloud gaming services work. In the decoder, which can be realized using massively produced cloud, a cloud gaming platform is hosted on cloud servers (inexpensive) decoder chips. The communications between in one or multiple data centers. The cloud gaming platform the cloud game platform and thin clients are over the best- runs computer game programs, which can be roughly divided effort Internet, which in turn makes supporting real-time into two major components: (i) game logic that is responsible computer games quite challenging. to convert gamer commands into in-game interactions, and In late 2000's, we started to see cloud gaming services (ii) scene renderer that generates game scenes in real-time. offered by startups, such as OnLive [67], Gaikai [27], The gamer commands come from the command interpreter, G-cluster [26], and Ubitus [93]. We also witnessed that Gaikai and the game scenes are captured by video capturer into was acquired by SONY,which is a major game console devel- videos, which are then compressed by video encoder. The oper [86]. This was followed by the competition between command interpreter, video capturer, and video encoder are Sony's PlayStation Now (PS Now) [68] and Nvidia's Grid 2169-3536 2016 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only. VOLUME 4, 2016 Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. 7605 See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. W. Cai et al.: Survey on Cloud Gaming: Future of Computer Games FIGURE 1. Typical cloud gaming services. Game Streaming Service [65], which further heats up the performance evaluations. The evaluations include measure- cloud gaming market. In fact, a 2014 report from Strategy ments on Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, such as energy Analytics [75] indicates that the number of cloud gaming consumption and network metrics, and Quality of Experi- users increases from 30 millions in 2014 to 150 millions ence (QoE) metrics, such as gamer perceived experience. in 2015. The same report also predicts that other leading Building platforms and testbeds, designing the test scenarios, game console manufactures will soon join the cloud gaming and carrying out the evaluations, require significant efforts, market. while analyzing the complex interplay between QoS and QoE The tremendous popularity of cloud gaming may be metrics is even more difficult. attributed to several potential advantages to gamers, game Second, the resulting platforms and evaluation procedures developers, and service providers. For gamers, cloud gaming allow the research community to optimize various compo- enables them to: (i) have access to their games anywhere and nents, such as cloud servers and communication channels. anytime, (ii) purchase or rent games on-demand, (iii) avoid More specifically, optimization techniques for: (i) better regularly upgrading their hardware, and (iv) enjoy unique fea- resource allocation and distributed architecture are possible tures such as migrating across client computers during game at cloud servers, and (ii) optimal content coding and adaptive sessions, observing ongoing tournaments, and sharing game transmissions are possible in communication channels. replays with friends. For game developers, cloud gaming Third, computer games are of various game genres [19]. allows them to: (i) concentrate on a single platform, which in These genres can be categorized on the basis of two elements: turn reduces the porting and testing costs, (ii) bypass retailers viewpoint and theme. Viewpoint is how a gamer observe for higher profit margins, (iii) reach out to more gamers, and the game scene. It determines the variability of rendered (iv) avoid piracy as the game software is never downloaded video on the screen. Most commonly seen viewpoints include to client computers. For service providers, cloud gaming: first-person, second-person, third-person, and omnipresent. (i) leads to new business models, (ii) creates more demands on First-person games adopt graphical perspectives rendered already-deployed cloud resources, and (iii) demonstrates the from the viewpoint of the in-game characters, such as in potential of other/new remote execution applications, since Counter-Strike. Second-person games are rendered from the cloud gaming imposes the strictest constraints on various back of the in-game characters, so that gamers can see the computing and networking resources. characters on the screen, like in Grand Theft Auto. Third- Despite the great opportunities of cloud gaming, person games fix the gamers' views on 3D scenes, projected several crucial challenges must be addressed by the research onto 2D spaces. Modern third-person games usually adopts community before it reaches its full potentials to attract more the sky view, also known as God view. Classic third-person gamers, game developers, and service providers. We summa- games include Diablo, Command & Conquer, FreeStyle, rize the most important aspect as follows. First, cloud gaming and etc. Last, omnipresent enables gamers to fully control platforms and testbeds must be built up for comprehensive views on the region of interest (RoI) from different angels 7606 VOLUME 4, 2016 W. Cai et al.: Survey on Cloud Gaming: Future of Computer Games and distances. Many recent war games, e.g., Age of other systems areas, is to put up basic platforms, Empires 3, Stronghold 2, and Warcraft III, fall into this cate- based on existing tools. We summarize such gory. Game theme determines how gamers interact with game system integration efforts, which serve as corner- content. Common themes include shooting, fighting, sports, stones of related research. turn-based role-playing (RPG), action role-playing (ARPG), b) Quality of Service Evaluations (Section III-B): turn-based strategy, real-time strategy (RTS), and manage- We survey the studies on objective metric evalua- ment simulation. Although the viewpoint may be restricted by tions, which algorithmically quantify the system game theme, but generally a game genre can be describe by performance, i.e., without subject assessments. a pair of viewpoint and theme, such as first-person shooting,
Recommended publications
  • Subjective Quality Assessment for Cloud Gaming
    Article Subjective Quality Assessment for Cloud Gaming Abdul Wahab 1,* , Nafi Ahmad 1 , Maria G. Martini 2 and John Schormans 1 1 School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK; Nafi[email protected] (N.A.); [email protected] (J.S.) 2 School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Kingston University, River House, 53-57 High Street, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 1LQ, UK; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Using subjective testing, we study the effect of the network parameters, delay and packet loss ratio, on the QoE of cloud gaming. We studied three different games, selected based on genre, popularity, content complexity and pace, and tested them in a controlled network environment, using a novel emulator to create realistic lognormal delay distributions instead of relying on a static mean delay, as used previously; we also used Parsec as a good representative of the state of the art. We captured user ratings on an ordinal Absolute Category Rating scale for three quality dimensions: Video QoE, Game-Playability QoE, and Overall QoE. We show that Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for the game with the highest levels of content complexity and pace are most severely affected by network impairments. We also show that the QoE of interactive cloud applications rely more on the game playability than the video quality of the game. Unlike earlier studies, the differences in MOS are validated using the distributions of the underlying dimensions. A Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test showed that the distributions of Video QoE and Game Playability QoE are not significantly different.
    [Show full text]
  • On Energy Consumption of Mobile Cloud Gaming Using Gaminganywhere
    Thesis no.:MSEE-2016-54 On energy consumption of mobile cloud gaming using GamingAnywhere Suren Musinada Faculty of Computing Blekinge Institute of Technology SE–371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden This thesis is submitted to the Faculty of Computing at Blekinge Institute of Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Electrical Engineering with Emphasis on Telecommunication Systems. The thesis is equivalent to 20 weeks of full time studies. Contact Information: Author(s): Suren Musinada E-mail: [email protected] University advisor: Dr. Yong Yao Department of communication systems E-mail: [email protected] Faculty of Computing Internet : www.bth.se Blekinge Institute of Technology Phone : +46 455 38 50 00 SE–371 79 Karlskrona, Sweden Fax : +46 455 38 50 57 Abstract In the contemporary world, there has been a great proliferation of using smart-phone devices and broadband wireless networks, the young gener- ation using mobile gaming market is tremendously increasing because of the enormous entertainment features. Mobile cloud gaming is a promising technology that overcome the implicit restrictions such as computational capacity and limited battery life. GamingAnywhere is an open source cloud gaming system which is used in this thesis and calculate the energy con- sumption of mobile device when using GamingAnywhere. The aim of the thesis is to measure the power consumption of the mo- bile device when the game is streamed from the GamingAnywhere server to GamingAnywhere client. Total power consumption is calculated for four resolutions by using the hardware monsoon power monitoring tool and the individual components of mobile device such as CPU, LCD and Audio power are calculated by software PowerTutor.
    [Show full text]
  • Video Games Review DRAFT5-16
    Video Games: History, Technology, Industry, and Research Agendas Table of Contents I. Overview ....................................................................................................................... 1 II. Video Game History .................................................................................................. 7 III. Academic Approaches to Video Games ................................................................. 9 1) Game Studies ....................................................................................................................... 9 2) Video Game Taxonomy .................................................................................................... 11 IV. Current Status ........................................................................................................ 12 1) Arcade Games ................................................................................................................... 12 2) Console Games .................................................................................................................. 13 3) PC Standalone Games ...................................................................................................... 14 4) Online Games .................................................................................................................... 15 5) Mobile Games .................................................................................................................... 16 V. Recent Trends ..........................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Mobile Gaming Playbook
    MOBILE GAMING PLAYBOOK BEST PRACTICES FOR MARKETING AND MONETIZING MOBILE GAMES Nadeem Almoayyed ([email protected]) https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadeemalmoayyed/ Kathy Liao ([email protected]) https://www.linkedin.com/in/liaokathy/ Ivan Zakharov ([email protected]) https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-zakharov-vc TUCK CENTER FOR DIGITAL STRATEGIES PAGEPAGE 01 01 PRISMA INC . TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 2 MARKETING 3 Importance of Soft Launches 4 Measuring Marketing Success 6 Creative Assets: In-House vs Outside Agency 8 Customer Segmentation 9 Advertising Optimization 11 CRM: Customer Relationship Management System 12 Influencer Marketing 13 Offline Attribution 15 MANAGING IP 1 6 ( INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ) BUSINESS MODELS IN AAA 1 9 GAMING Evolution of Monetization in Gaming 19 How the Subscription World Looks Today 21 What Mobile Can Learn from AAA around Subscriptions 22 Subscription Platforms 23 What Works and What Doesn't in Subscription Platforms 25 What Should Mobile Game Developers Do? 27 FINANCING AND PRICING 2 8 STRATEGY Game Development Cost Trends 28 Key Pricing Trends 29 THETUCK CENTER CENTERTUCK CENTERFOR FOR DIGITAL DIGITAL FOR DIGITALSTRATEGIES STRATEGIES STRATEGIES PAGEPAGE 0402 02 INTRODUCTION As mobile technology improves and mobile phone penetration increases around the world, mobile games have seen their popularity increase over the years. The mobile game industry is currently worth $68.5B, and many of the largest gaming companies are investing heavily in the space. Activision acquired King Digital Entertainment several years ago to solidify its position in the mobile gaming space, Blizzard has invested heavily in Hearthstone’s mobile presence, and Riot Games is developing a mobile version of its hugely popular League of Legends IP due out in 2020.
    [Show full text]
  • OFFLINE GAMING VS CLOUD GAMING (ONLINE GAMING) Mr
    ISSN: 0974-3308, VOL. 11, NO. 2 DECEMBER 2018 @ SRIMCA 99 OFFLINE GAMING VS CLOUD GAMING (ONLINE GAMING) Mr. Amit Khatri Abstract—Games has always been a major source of entertainment in every generation and so exiting their history is, because it has various factor involved like Video Games Industry and various generations of video games. Due to improvements in graphics, a revolution has occurred in computer games. Storage for Video Games has always been a problem whether it is a Gaming Console or a PC but has been resolved generation by generation. Games also attracted the uninterested audience. Offline Gaming has been very popular for a year but has various drawbacks. Cloud Gaming is the resolution against Offline Gaming. This paper talks about how Cloud Gaming is taking place of Offline Gaming with much powerful hardware systems and processes. Keywords—Gaming, Cloud Gaming, Gaming PC, Gaming Console, Video Games. I. GAMING AND ITS HISTORY Computerized game playing, whether it is over a personal computer, mobile phone or a video game console can be referred to as Gaming. An individual who plays video games is recognized as a gamer [1]. In every generation of technology evolution, graphics of the game have been improved. When we think the history of video games we usually think of games like Tic- tac-toe, Tetris, Pacman, pong and many more but now these games use graphics seems like reality. In the 1950s, People can’t think of playing card games such as Solitaire, Blackjack, Hearts, Spider Solitaire and so on, on tv or computer but now the stage has reached more ahead from that [1].
    [Show full text]
  • Research Article Synchronous Remote Rendering for VR
    Hindawi International Journal of Computer Games Technology Volume 2021, Article ID 6676644, 16 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6676644 Research Article Synchronous Remote Rendering for VR Viktor Kelkkanen ,1 Markus Fiedler ,2 and David Lindero3 1Department of Computer Science, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona 37179, Sweden 2Department of Technology and Aesthetics, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlshamn 37435, Sweden 3Ericsson Research, Ericsson AB, Luleå 97753, Sweden Correspondence should be addressed to Viktor Kelkkanen; [email protected] Received 5 November 2020; Revised 12 March 2021; Accepted 8 July 2021; Published 20 July 2021 Academic Editor: Michael J. Katchabaw Copyright © 2021 Viktor Kelkkanen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Remote rendering for VR is a technology that enables high-quality VR on low-powered devices. This is realized by offloading heavy computation and rendering to high-powered servers that stream VR as video to the clients. This article focuses on one specific issue in remote rendering when imperfect frame timing between client and server may cause recurring frame drops. We propose a system design that executes synchronously and eliminates the aforementioned problem. The design is presented, and an implementation is tested using various networks and hardware. The design cannot drop frames due to synchronization issues but may on the other hand stall if temporal disturbances occur, e.g., due to network delay spikes or loss. However, experiments confirm that such events can remain rare given an appropriate environment.
    [Show full text]
  • Cloud Gaming: Enabling a Next Generation Gaming and Streaming Paradigm
    CLOUD GAMING: ENABLING A NEXT GENERATION GAMING AND STREAMING PARADIGM Analysts: Eric Abbruzzese, Michael Inouye TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. A CONFLUENCE OF GAMING AND STREAMING MARKETS 1. A CONFLUENCE OF GAMING AND The immense video streaming market is already laying the groundwork for high-volume, STREAMING MARKETS ....................... 1 high-bandwidth content potential, so the onset of cloud gaming excitement was not a sur- 1.1. Gaming Market Dynamics .........................3 prise. The gaming market is responsible for more than US$150 billion in revenue overall. 1.2. Video Market Dynamics and Any new service or technology that can tap into even a sliver of that revenue is promising. Similarities to Gaming ...............................4 2. STATE OF THE CLOUD GAMING MARKET 6 Cloud gaming promises a layer of flexibility not previously possible in the market. Low end- 2.1. Business Models Today and to-end latency enables data centers to take the place of processing needed by a user’s Shifting toward Cloud Gaming in the Near Future ........................................7 Personal Computer (PC), console, or mobile device. New spectrum availability and wired 2.2. Technical Details .......................................8 broadband opportunity, mature existing infrastructure from the video market, and increas- 2.3. Competition and Differentiators .............10 ingly powerful and efficient cloud-native technologies all contribute to this progression. Pro- 2.4. Gamification Outside of Gaming .............11 cessing in the cloud allows for any device to have the processing power of a high-end PC 2.5. Immersive Technologies as an without the local hardware cost. Cloud gaming represents a first step in cloud infrastructure Upcoming Feature for Cloud Gaming .....12 usage, with distributed and load-balanced compute in the future allowing more scalable 3.
    [Show full text]
  • Mobile Cloud Gaming: the Real-World Cloud Gaming Experience in Los Angeles
    Mobile cloud gaming: the real-world cloud gaming experience in Los Angeles 2 Table of contents 4 The cloud gaming landscape is booming With the arrival of 5G, more and more gamers are putting away their consoles and replacing them with cloud-based games that can be enjoyed anywhere and everywhere they go—and on any connected device they choose. To show you what to expect in terms of the quality of the mobile cloud gaming experience, we looked at multiple elements of gaming, including the bare minimum download speeds This report shows which carriers in Los Angeles can deliver a smooth mobile cloud and latency established by three major gaming platforms: gaming experience for both casual games in standard definition and multiplayer online games in high definition on 4G LTE compared to 5G. Why did we choose Los Angeles? LA is a city of innovation, a driver of entertainment Steam trends, and one of the first markets where all four carriers offered 5G services. Google Microsoft Remote What better place to look closely at how 5G might help transform the gaming Stadia xCloud experience? Read on to see what to expect in terms of the real-world mobile cloud Play gaming experience in Los Angeles. Using the bare minimum speed and latency requirements set by those platforms, we took results from our most recent mobile performance testing in Los Angeles in the first half of 2020 to show which carriers are capable of delivering smooth mobile cloud gaming experiences on both 4G LTE and 5G. IHS Markit expects the cloud gaming content and services markets to grow from We looked at gaming across two broad categories at two different resolutions: $387 million in 2018 to $2.5 billion in 2023, with 5G driving much of that growth.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Quality of Service of Cloud Gaming Systems
    IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. X, NO. X, SEPTEMBER 2013 1 On the Quality of Service of Cloud Gaming Systems Kuan-Ta Chen, Member, IEEE, Yu-Chun Chang, Hwai-Jung Hsu, De-Yu Chen, Chun-Ying Huang, Member, IEEE, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Member, IEEE Abstract Cloud gaming, i.e., real-time game playing via thin clients, relieves users from being forced to upgrade their computers and resolve the incompatibility issues between games and computers. As a result, cloud gaming is generating a great deal of interests among entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, general publics, and researchers. However, given the large design space, it is not yet known which cloud gaming system delivers the best user-perceived Quality of Service (QoS) and what design elements constitute a good cloud gaming system. This study is motivated by the question: How good is the QoS of current cloud gaming systems? Answering the question is challenging because most cloud gaming systems are proprietary and closed, and thus their internal mechanisms are not accessible for the research community. In this paper, we propose a suite of measurement techniques to evaluate the QoS of cloud gaming systems and prove the effectiveness of our schemes using a case study comprising two well-known cloud gaming systems: OnLive and StreamMyGame. Our results show that OnLive performs better, because it provides adaptable frame rates, better graphic quality, and shorter server processing delays, while consuming less network bandwidth. Our measurement techniques are general and can be applied to any cloud gaming systems, so that researchers, users, and service providers may systematically quantify the QoS of these systems.
    [Show full text]
  • Performance Impact of Packet Multiplexing on Massive Multiplayer Online Games Dammak Marwa, Yassine Boujelben, Noura Sellami, Iryna Andriyanova
    Performance impact of packet multiplexing on massive multiplayer online games Dammak Marwa, Yassine Boujelben, Noura Sellami, Iryna Andriyanova To cite this version: Dammak Marwa, Yassine Boujelben, Noura Sellami, Iryna Andriyanova. Performance impact of packet multiplexing on massive multiplayer online games. Proceedings of the ACM Summer Computer Simulation Conference, Jul 2016, Montreal, Canada. hal-01709721 HAL Id: hal-01709721 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01709721 Submitted on 15 Feb 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Performance impact of packet multiplexing on massive multiplayer online games Marwa Dammak Yassine Boujelben Noura Sellami LETI, ENIS LETI, ENET’COM LETI, ENIS University of Sfax, Tunisia University of Sfax, Tunisia University of Sfax, Tunisia [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Iryna Andriyanova ETIS, ENSEA University Cergy Pontoise, CNRS, France [email protected] ABSTRACT This share is increasing year after year and will grow at a Online games are more and more popular, resulting in an compound annual growth rate of 40% between 2014 and 2019 increasing share in the Internet traffic. These games gen- [8]. With the recent advent of cloud gaming and the gaming erate a huge number of packets with typically small pay- as a service (GaaS) solutions, the gaming traffic should be- loads, which overloads the network and deteriorates its effi- come one of the largest Internet traffic categories [2].
    [Show full text]
  • Gaminganywhere: an Open Cloud Gaming System
    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 [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [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.
    [Show full text]
  • MCG Test-Bed: an Experimental Test-Bed for Mobile Cloud Gaming
    MCG Test-bed: An Experimental Test-bed for Mobile Cloud Gaming Wei Cai Conghui Zhou Minchen Li University of British Columbia We Software Limited Zhejiang University Vancouver, Canada Hong Kong Hangzhou, China [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Xiuhua Li Victor C.M. Leung University of British Columbia University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Vancouver, Canada [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT games, which is responsive to the variety of players' screen Conventional cloud gaming benefits from many aspects by sizes, device hardware capacity, operating systems and inter- executing the game engine in the cloud and streaming the actional controllers. This demand has significantly soared, gaming videos to players' terminals through network. How- along with the arising number of mobile terminals in mod- ever, this type of cloud gaming service can not guarantee ern society. The cloud, well recognized as the next genera- stable Quality of Service (QoS) in mobile scenarios, subject tion computing modality, has attracted attentions in video to the diversity of end-user devices and frequent changes in gaming service provisioning. Conventional cloud gaming so- lutions, including industrial systems (e.g. OnLive1, Gaikai2, network quality. To address this issue, a component-based 3 cloud gaming platform for mobile devices has been proposed, G-Cluster , etc.) and research test-beds (e.g. GamingAny- where the decomposed game can be partially offloaded to where[1]), exhibit a streaming-based approach, in which the the cloud, achieving load balancing between cloud and ter- video games are executed in cloud servers and the gaming minals.
    [Show full text]