An empirical study of Cloud Gaming

This work is at: 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames), took place November 22-23, 2012 in Venice (Italy)Online gaming connects players from all over the world together for fun and entertainment, and has been regarded as one of the most profitable and popular Internet services. Besides, there is a growing trend towards moving local applications to remote data centers: this is often referred to as the cloud. With the purpose of studying the impact of Cloud Gaming on the access network load, in this paper we carry out an empirical network traffic analysis of two well-known cloud gaming platforms: On-Live and Gaikai. Traffic traces have been collected and analysed from five different games of both platforms. Cloud gaming has been observed to be remarkably different from traditional online gaming in terms of network load and traffic characteristics. Moreover, the traces have revealed similarities between the two platforms regarding the packet size distribution, and differences concerning the packet inter-arrival times. However, each platform shows a similar traffic pattern for most of the games it serves. Nonetheless, the racing and shooter games considered in this work demand more bandwidth than other game-genres.This work is partly supported by the projects TRION (TEC 2009-10724), FIERRO (TEC 2010- 12250-E) and Medianet (S-2009/TIC-1468); and by the Generalitat de Catalunya through the research support program project SGR-1202 and AGAUR FI-DGR 2012 grant.Publicad

Strategic business models of platform providers in the video gaming industry - cloud gaming value proposition analysis

This Work Project examines the evolution and variation of business models within the Online Video Gaming Platform Industry. In the present paper, an in-depth analysis of the cloud gaming value proposition is provided. Accessibility, affordability, and simplicity are the strongest components of the cloud gaming value proposition and differ significantly from the value proposition of other business models within the industry. Further, specific advantages and weaknesses of the business model are outlined, and overriding recommendations are presented to strategically optimize this business model. To conclude, key insights and limitations as well as future research are discussed

Strategic business models of platform providers in the video gaming industry - cloud gaming customer segmentation analysis

This work project examines the evolution and variation of business models within the online video gaming platform industry. In the present paper, an in-depth analysis of the recent business model of cloud gaming is provided. With large gaming audiences that differ in needs and preferences, segmentation should occur based on gamer type. The analysis reveals a large potential, especially within the non-gamer and casual gamer segments. Further, advantages and weaknesses of the business model are outlined, and overriding recommendations are presented to strategically optimize it. To conclude, key insights and limitations as well as future research are discussed

Challenges in real-time virtualization and predictable cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization technology have revolutionized general-purpose computing applications in the past decade. The cloud paradigm offers advantages through reduction of operation costs, server consolidation, flexible system configuration and elastic resource provisioning. However, despite the success of cloud computing for general-purpose computing, existing cloud computing and virtualization technology face tremendous challenges in supporting emerging soft real-time applications such as online video streaming, cloud-based gaming, and telecommunication management. These applications demand real-time performance in open, shared and virtualized computing environments. This paper identifies the technical challenges in supporting real-time applications in the cloud, surveys recent advancement in real-time virtualization and cloud computing technology, and offers research directions to enable cloud-based real-time applications in the future

Cloud for Gaming

Cloud for Gaming refers to the use of cloud computing technologies to build large-scale gaming infrastructures, with the goal of improving scalability and responsiveness, improve the user's experience and enable new business models.Comment: Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Newton Lee (Editor). Springer International Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-08234-

Foveated Video Streaming for Cloud Gaming

Good user experience with interactive cloud-based multimedia applications, such as cloud gaming and cloud-based VR, requires low end-to-end latency and large amounts of downstream network bandwidth at the same time. In this paper, we present a foveated video streaming system for cloud gaming. The system adapts video stream quality by adjusting the encoding parameters on the fly to match the player's gaze position. We conduct measurements with a prototype that we developed for a cloud gaming system in conjunction with eye tracker hardware. Evaluation results suggest that such foveated streaming can reduce bandwidth requirements by even more than 50% depending on parametrization of the foveated video coding and that it is feasible from the latency perspective.Comment: Submitted to: IEEE 19th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processin