Ad hoc cloudlet based mobile gaming : progressive downloading and cooperative task allocation

Abstract

As the game industry matures, processing complex game logics in a timely manner is no longer an insurmountable problem. Many researchers are now trying to find ways to optimize the gaming system regarding the network usage, interactive latency, energy consumption, and local resource utilization. However, current cloud-based mobile gaming solutions are limited by their relatively high requirements on Internet resources. Also, they typically do not consider the geographical locations of nearby mobile users and thus ignore the potential cooperation among them. Therefore, inspired by existing cloud computing techniques, as well as the concept of both cloudlet computing, and ad hoc mobile cloud computing, in this thesis, we introduce an ad hoc mobile cloud-cloudlet-cloud based three-tier approach to cooperative mobile gaming architecture. Two types of cooperation will be provided: cooperation with and without the assistance from the cloudlet(s), which is defined by the way in which mobile devices are connected to and interact with the cloud. In this thesis, two modules of the architecture are introduced: 1) progressive game resources download, by which mobile users can adaptively download gaming resources from cloud servers or nearby mobile users according to their gaming progresses, and 2) ad hoc mobile cloud based cooperative task allocation, by which gaming components can be executed dynamically over local devices, nearby devices, stationary cloudlet(s), or cloud servers. We formulate the mechanisms for both modules as optimization problems and propose several algorithms for both modules, which are later used for evaluation purposes. We carry out simulations based on real mobility traces, and the results show that our system's performance depends highly on the ad hoc network environments (the more concurrent and balanced connections within the ad hoc network, the lower the system resource usage). Also, regardless of the network environments, our system has lower system resource usage while utilizing resources of nearby devices, compared to the cloud-based gaming architecture. Moreover, our evaluation results show that by adding cloudlet(s) into our architecture, the system performance is improved. Also, at the end of the thesis, we give a comprehensive analysis of the system.