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An Analysis of Cloud Gaming Platforms Behaviour Under Synthetic Network Constraints and Real Cellular Networks Conditions

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Abstract

With the recent technological evolutions in networks and increased deployment of multi-tier clouds, cloud gaming (CG) is gaining renewed interest and is expected to become a major Internet service in the upcoming years. Many companies have launched powerful platforms such as Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PlayStation Now, among others, to attract players. However, for all end-users to fully enjoy their gaming sessions over the wide range of network access qualities, CG platforms must adapt their traffic. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a comprehensive measurement study performed on the four aforementioned CG platforms, configuring different synthetic network constraints like packet loss, throughput decrease, latency increase and jitter variation to observe the traffic of these CG platforms under degraded network conditions and infer their adaptive behaviour. We also present how the four CG platforms behave when used under real cellular network conditions, captured on the Orange network in January 2022. Our findings show that the four platforms exhibit different adaptation behaviours. Moreover, many cases result in a degraded QoS, leaving room for further improvements at both application and/or network levels.

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Notes

  1. https://play.geforcenow.com/mall/#/layout/games.

  2. https://stadia.google.com/.

  3. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps-now/.

  4. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/play.

  5. https://www.amazon.com/luna/landing-page.

  6. Amazon Luna would have been another interesting candidate, but it is not yet officially released to date and not accessible in European countries.

  7. We drew and analyzed 96 plots in total: 4 platforms * 4 network constraints * 3 reported metrics * 2 directions.

  8. Full dataset repository (120Go): https://cloud-gaming-traces.lhs.loria.fr/index.html.

  9. http://mahimahi.mit.edu/.

  10. https://github.com/ravinet/mahimahi/tree/master/traces.

  11. https://cloud-gaming-traces.lhs.loria.fr/data.html.

  12. https://github.com/keithw/multisend/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) MOSAICO Project, under Grant No ANR-19-CE25-0012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA, 54000, Nancy, France

    Xavier Marchal, Philippe Graff, Thibault Cholez & Olivier Festor

  2. Orange Innovation, Lannion, France

    Joël Roman Ky, Stéphane Tuffin & Bertrand Mathieu

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  1. Xavier Marchal
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  2. Philippe Graff
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  4. Thibault Cholez
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Contributions

XM made most of the experiments, analysis and writing work in the paper. He produced all the Figures. PG contributed to the experiments and wrote most of the state of the art. JRK produced the traces from real cellular network and wrote the related Sect. 6.1. TC led the paper direction, organized the work, reviewed all the manuscript and wrote the conclusion. ST refined the analysis work, helped design the experiment and relevant metrics, wrote part of the state of the art and reviewed the manuscript. BM wrote the abstract and introduction, part of the Sect. 6, initiated the capture of cellular network traces and reviewed the manuscript. OF reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thibault Cholez.

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Bertrand Mathieu declares to be a guest editor of the present journal but he will not take part in the review or editorial process for the present paper. The other authors declare to have no conflict of interest.

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Marchal, X., Graff, P., Ky, J.R. et al. An Analysis of Cloud Gaming Platforms Behaviour Under Synthetic Network Constraints and Real Cellular Networks Conditions. J Netw Syst Manage 31, 39 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-023-09720-9

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