A Novel Game Map Preloading and Resource Provisioning Scheme in Cooperative Cloud Networks Ziqiao Lin, Zehua Wang, Wei Cai and Victor C.M. Leung Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4 Email: ft2v0b, zwang, wcai,
[email protected] Abstract—With the popularization of mobile smart devices gaming experience. Thus, it is crucial to reduce the mobile data (e.g., smartphones, tablets), the number of mobile game players traffic required in game contents downloading and updating. increases significantly. This makes mobile gaming industry rise Although there are many affordable data plans offered by and take up a large piece of global game market. Different from the traditional players playing games on their personal computers mobile companies, for the game which needs to frequently with wired local area network or Wi-Fi access, mobile game download or update detailed graphic maps, there is still a players nowadays play online games on their smart devices that considerable cost on data. From the report [3], like Spacetime communicate to cloud servers via wireless cellular networks. Studios Pocket Legends, for example, a mobile player usually Therefore, the monetary cost for game content downloading uses 17MB Internet data while continuously playing for 10 and updating via cellular networks may increase the burden of gamers. Meanwhile, an unpredictable latency may be introduced minutes. Thus, the mobile player may think that it does by communication links of wireless cellular networks. This may not worth to update or download game content via cellular negatively affect player’s gaming experience.