Improving Cloud Gaming Experience through Mobile Edge Computing

TLDR

Mobile gaming has expanded with 4G/5G, yet cloud gaming still suffers from high delay and bandwidth demands. EdgeGame is proposed to enhance the cloud gaming experience by leveraging edge computing resources. The framework offloads rendering to the edge, employs deep reinforcement learning to adapt video bitrates, and was prototyped and benchmarked against an existing system. Experiments demonstrate a 50 % reduction in average network delay and a 20 % improvement in user QoE.

Abstract

With the development of 4G/5G technology and smart devices, more and more users begin to play games via their mobile devices. As a promising way to enable users to play any games, cloud gaming is proposed to stream game scene rendered remotely in the cloud with the format of video. However, it faces major challenges in terms of long delay and high network bandwidth. To this end, a novel framework named EdgeGame is proposed to improve the cloud gaming experience by leveraging resources in the edge. Compared to existing cloud gaming systems, EdgeGame offloads the computation-intensive rendering to the network edge instead, which can reduce network delay and bandwidth consumption greatly. Moreover, EdgeGame introduces deep reinforcement learning in the edge to adjust the video bitrates adaptively to accommodate the network dynamics. Finally, we implemented a prototype system and compared it with an existing cloud gaming system. The experiments show that EdgeGame can reduce the average network delay by 50 percent and improve user's QoE by 20 percent.