Towards pervasive and mobile gaming with distributed cloud infrastructure

Abstract

Cloud gaming, where the game is rendered in the cloud and is streamed to an end-user device through a thin client, is rapidly gaining ground. Latency is still a key challenge to cloud gaming: highly interactive games can become unplayable even with response delays below 100 ms. To overcome this issue, we propose to deploy gaming services on a more distributed cloud infrastructure, and to instantiate gaming servers in close proximity of the user when necessary in order to shorten the response delay. Our prototype distributed cloud gaming platform also allows flexible configuration of gaming controls and video streams, enabling the use of public displays in mobile cloud gaming. We test our prototype with two games in different deployment scenarios, and measure the response delay and power consumption of the mobile devices. Our experiment results confirm that it is feasible to improve the quality of gaming experience through the deployment strategies provided by the proposed system.