Multiplayer cloud gaming system with cooperative video sharing

Abstract

Mobile cloud-based video gaming (MCVG) is an emerging trend in moving the online entertainment industry into the cloud era. In MCVG, the game engines are hosted in the cloud, and the rendered gaming videos are transmitted over wireless networks to the mobile devices. In reverse, game players' interactions on screens are sent to the cloud server over the same networks. How to compress and transmit the real-time gaming video, so that during the gaming session, the expected server transmission rate over the bandwidth-limited wireless network is minimized while satisfying the quality of experience demanded by the players, is a great technical challenge that is addressed in this paper in a multi-player gaming context. We exploit the correlations between the gaming videos for distinct players in the same gaming scene to propose a cloud gaming system with cooperative video sharing, in which the cloud game server is able to efficiently encode and transmit multiple video streams to a group of players, while those players are able to decode their video in a cooperative manner by sharing contents via a secondary network such as ad hoc wireless local area network. Experimental results show that the expected server transmission rate can be significantly reduced compared to the conventional video encoding schemes for cloud games.