Delay Sensitivity Classification of Cloud Gaming Content

Cloud Gaming is an emerging service that catches growing interest in the research community as well as industry. While the paradigm shift from a game execution on clients to streaming games from the cloud offers a variety of benefits, the new services also require a highly reliable and low latency network to achieve a satisfying Quality of Experience (QoE) for its users. Using a cloud gaming service with high latency would harm the interaction of the user with the game, leading to a decrease in playing performance and thus frustration of players. However, the negative effect of delay on gaming QoE depends strongly on the game content. At a certain level of delay, a slow-paced card game is typically not as delay sensitive as a shooting game. For optimal resource allocation and quality estimation, it is highly important for cloud providers, game developers, and network planners to consider the impact of the game content. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the delay impact on QoE for cloud gaming applications by identifying game characteristics influencing the delay perception of users. In addition, an expert evaluation methodology to quantify these characteristics, as well as a delay sensitivity classification based on a decision tree is presented. The ratings of 14 experts for the quantification indicated an excellent level of agreement which demonstrates the reliability of the proposed method. Additionally, the decision tree reached an accuracy of 86.6 % on determining the delay sensitivity classes which were derived from a large dataset of subjective input quality ratings during a series of experiments.Comment: Accepted In International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems 2020. ACM, Istanbul, Turke

Uniquitous: Implementation and Evaluation of a Cloud-based Game System in Unity3d

Cloud gaming is a new service based on cloud computation technology which allows games to be run on a server and streamed as video to players on a thin client. Commercial cloud gaming systems, such as Onlive, Gaikai and StreamMyGame remain proprietary, limiting access for game developers and researchers. In order to address these shortcomings, we developed an open source Unity3d cloud-based game system called Uniquitous that gives the game developers and researchers control of system and content. Detailed experiments evaluate performance of three main parameters: game genre, game resolution and game image quality. The evaluation results are used in a data model that can predict in-game frame rates for systems that have not been tested. Validation experiments show the accuracy of our model and allow us to use the model to explore cloud-based games in a variety of system conditions

Quality of experience driven control of interactive media stream parameters

In recent years, cloud computing has led to many new kinds of services. One of these popular services is cloud gaming, which provides the entire game experience to the users remotely from a server, but also other applications are provided in a similar manner. In this paper we focus on the option to render the application in the cloud, thereby delivering the graphical output of the application to the user as a video stream. In more general terms, an interactive media stream is set up over the network between the user's device and the cloud server. The main issue with this approach is situated at the network, that currently gives little guarantees on the quality of service in terms of parameters such as available bandwidth, latency or packet loss. However, for interactive media stream cases, the user is merely interested in the perceived quality, regardless of the underlaying network situation. In this paper, we present an adaptive control mechanism that optimizes the quality of experience for the use case of a race game, by trading off visual quality against frame rate in function of the available bandwidth. Practical experiments verify that QoE driven adaptation leads to improved user experience compared to systems solely taking network characteristics into account

Measuring the latency of cloud gaming systems

Cloud gaming, i.e., real-time game playing via thin clients, relieves players from the need to constantly upgrade their computers and deal with compatibility issues when playing games. As a result, cloud gaming is generating a great deal of interest among entrepreneurs and the public. However, given the large design space, it is not yet known which plat-forms deliver the best quality of service and which design elements constitute a good cloud gaming system. This study is motivated by the question: How good is the real-timeliness of current cloud gaming systems? To ad-dress the question, we analyze the response latency of two cloud gaming platforms, namely, OnLive and StreamMy-Game. Our results show that the streaming latency of On-Live is reasonable for real-time cloud gaming, while that of StreamMyGame is almost twice the former when the StreamMyGame server is provisioned using an Intel Core i7-920 PC. We believe that our measurement approach can be generally applied to PC-based cloud gaming platforms, and that it will further the understanding of such systems and lead to improvements

QoS-aware service continuity in the virtualized edge

5G systems are envisioned to support numerous delay-sensitive applications such as the tactile Internet, mobile gaming, and augmented reality. Such applications impose new demands on service providers in terms of the quality of service (QoS) provided to the end-users. Achieving these demands in mobile 5G-enabled networks represent a technical and administrative challenge. One of the solutions proposed is to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the network. In such vision, services are cloudified and encapsulated within the virtual machines or containers placed in cloud hosts at the network access layer. To enable ultrashort processing times and immediate service response, fast instantiation, and migration of service instances between edge nodes are mandatory to cope with the consequences of user’s mobility. This paper surveys the techniques proposed for service migration at the edge of the network. We focus on QoS-aware service instantiation and migration approaches, comparing the mechanisms followed and emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we highlight the open research challenges still left unhandled.publishe