Towards cloudlet-based mobile cloud gaming

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud computing technologies, cloud gaming has gained wide attention from the industrial field. By executing the gaming software on the cloud and transiting the rendered game scenes back to the client, game players can play games anywhere on any device. However, the centralized architecture of existing cloud gaming platforms causes serious network latency, which deteriorates user experience significantly. To reduce network latency and relieve the workload on the mobile client, we propose and implement a cloudlet-based mobile cloud gaming system design. By deploying the cloudlets in the nearby region of mobile users, we can provide computational resources to the mobile clients and complete tasks such as gaming state maintenance, game scene rendering, etc. The system can also reduce the gaming latency and the workload on the client greatly. We use the open-source cloud computing software to build a cloudlet system and develop an Android-based cloud gaming client, which can receive and display gaming video streams, and map and upload the game operations. Finally, we conduct experimental evaluation of our mobile cloud gaming prototype. The results show that our proposed solution can significantly reduce the fraction of network latency.