Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

CloudyGame: Enabling cloud gaming on the edge with dynamic asset streaming and shared game instances

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Cloud gaming has emerged as a new computer game delivery paradigm that promises gaming anywhere, anytime, on any device, by running the computer game on a cloud server and streaming the rendered frames to users. To fulfill its promises, a cloud gaming provider must face three main challenges: reducing the interaction latency, reducing the cloud infrastructure cost, and reducing the network bandwidth demand. One way to reduce interaction latency is to run the game on the edge instead of the cloud. This introduces two additional challenges due to the limited resources available on the edge servers. First, there is a high initialization cost to install a game on the edge server if the game that a player wishes to play is not already installed. Second, an edge server typically has limited computing resources compared to the servers in the cloud. In this work, we address these two issues by proposing CloudyGame, a new software architecture for developing computer games, in which (i) resources are more efficiently shared and managed between different playing instances, and (ii) game assets are streamed on-demand to reduce the initialization cost. CloudyGame is implemented with a popular game engine, and thus any game built on the engine supports CloudyGame out of the box. Our evaluation shows that a game running on CloudyGame architecture needs 70–80% less RAM, VRAM, and CPU than a game using conventional architecture when running with four players. Furthermore, the game asset streaming system reduces the game’s initial loading time by 70%. Hence, our cloud gaming architecture is highly scalable and economically deployable to the edge. Further, due to a reduction in resource usage, the CloudyGame architecture would benefit games running in the cloud as well.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now

  2. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/playstationnow

  3. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine (available after signup)

  4. https://developer.nvidia.com/capture-sdk

  5. https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

  6. https://www.ffmpeg.org

  7. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

  8. https://www.sqlite.org/inmemorydb.html

  9. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

  10. https://www.wireshark.org/

References

  1. Amiri M, Osman HA, Shirmohammadi S, Abdallah M (2016) Toward delay-efficient game-aware data centers for cloud gaming. ACM Trans Multimedia Comput Commun Appl 12(5s):71:1–71:19. https://doi.org/10.1145/2983639

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Anand B, Ananda AL, Chan MC, Le LT, Balan RK (2009) Game action based power management for multiplayer online game. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on networking, systems, and applications for mobile handhelds, MobiHeld ’09,. ACM, New York, pp 55–60, https://doi.org/10.1145/1592606.1592619, (to appear in print)

  3. Basiri M, Rasoolzadegan A (2016) Delay-aware resource provisioning for cost-efficient cloud gaming IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

  4. Bhojan A, Edwin AJH (2014) Gamelets: Multiplayer mobile games with distributed micro-clouds. In: Mobile computing and ubiquitous networking (ICMU), 2014 seventh international conference on, pp 14–20, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMU.2014.6799051, (to appear in print)

  5. Cai W, Chi Y, Zhou C, Zhu C, Leung VCM (2018) Ubcgaming: Ubiquitous cloud gaming system. IEEE Syst J 12(3):2483–2494. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSYST.2018.2797080

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Chen H, Zhang X, Xu Y, Ren J, Fan J, Ma Z, Zhang W (2019) T-gaming: a cost-efficient cloud gaming system at scale. IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst pp 1–1 https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2019.2922205https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2019.2922205

  7. Chen KT, Chang YC, Tseng PH, Huang CY, Lei CL (2011) Measuring the latency of cloud gaming systems. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on multimedia, MM ’11. ACM, New York, pp 1269–1272

  8. Deng Y, Li Y, Tang X, Cai W (2016) Server allocation for multiplayer cloud gaming. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on multimedia conference, MM ’16. ACM, New York, pp 918–927, https://doi.org/10.1145/2964284.2964301, (to appear in print)

  9. Eu YX, Tanu J, Law JJ, B Ghazali MH, Tay SS, Ooi WT, Bhojan A (2016) Superstreamer: enabling progressive content streaming in a game engine. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference, MM ’16. ACM, New York, pp 737–738, https://doi.org/10.1145/2964284.2973827, (to appear in print)

  10. Gharsallaoui R, Hamdi M, Kim T (2017) A novel adaptive streaming approach for cloud-based mobile video games. In: 2017 13Th international wireless communications and mobile computing conference (IWCMC), pp 1072–1077, https://doi.org/10.1109/IWCMC.2017.7986434, (to appear in print)

  11. Hong HJ, Chen DY, Huang CY, Chen KT, Hsu CH (2015) Placing virtual machines to optimize cloud gaming experience. IEEE Trans Cloud Comput 3(1):42–53. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2014.2338295

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Jarschel M, Schlosser D, Scheuring S, Hobfeld T (2013) Gaming in the clouds: QoE and the users perspective. Mathem Comput Modell 57:2883–2894. Information system security and performance modeling and simulation for future mobile networks

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Li Y, Shan C, Chen R, Tang X, Cai W, Tang S, Liu X, Wang G, Gong X, Zhang Y (2019) GAugur: Quantifying performance interference of colocated games for improving resource utilization in cloud gaming. In: Proceedings of the 28th international symposium on high-performance parallel and distributed computing, HPDC ’19. ACM, New York, pp 231–242, https://doi.org/10.1145/3307681.3325409, (to appear in print)

  14. Li Z, Aaron A, Katsavounidis I, Moorthy A, Manohara M (2016) Toward a practical perceptual video quality metric. The Netflix Tech Blog 6:2

    Google Scholar 

  15. Qi Z, Yao J, Zhang C, Yu M, Yang Z, Guan H (2014) Vgris: Virtualized gpu resource isolation and scheduling in cloud gaming. ACM Trans Archit Code Optim 11(2):17:1–17:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/2632216

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Shea R, Liu J, Ngai EH, Cui Y (2013) Cloud gaming: architecture and performance. Netw IEEE 27(4):16–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Sun K, Wu D (2015) Video rate control strategies for cloud gaming. J Vis Commun Image Represent 30(Complete):234–241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvcir.2015.03.012

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Wang S, Dey S (2010) Rendering adaptation to address communication and computation constraints in cloud mobile gaming. In: 2010 IEEE global telecommunications conference GLOBECOM 2010, pp 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOCOM.2010.5684144, (to appear in print)

  19. Wu J, Yuen C, Cheung NM, Chen J, Chen CW (2015) Enabling adaptive high-frame-rate video streaming in mobile cloud gaming applications. IEEE Trans Circ Syst Video Technol 25(12):1988–2001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Zhang C, Yao J, Qi Z, Yu M (2014) Guan, H.: vgasa: Adaptive scheduling algorithm of virtualized gpu resource in cloud gaming. IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst 25(11):3036–3045

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Zhang W, Liao X, Li P, Jin H, Lin L (2017) Sharerender: Bypassing gpu virtualization to enable fine-grained resource sharing for cloud gaming. In: Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, MM ’17. ACM, New York, pp 324–332, https://doi.org/10.1145/3123266.3123306, (to appear in print)

  22. Zhang Y, Qu P, Cihang J, Zheng W (2016) A cloud gaming system based on user-level virtualization and its resource scheduling. IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst 27(5):1239–1252. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2015.2433916

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 13 Computing Drive, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 117417, Singapore, Singapore

    Anand Bhojan, Siang Ping Ng, Joel Ng & Wei Tsang Ooi

Authors
  1. Anand Bhojan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Siang Ping Ng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Joel Ng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Wei Tsang Ooi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anand Bhojan.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This work is supported by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1T1251RES1506 “Cloud-based Multi-user Interactive Virtual Environments”

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bhojan, A., Ng, S.P., Ng, J. et al. CloudyGame: Enabling cloud gaming on the edge with dynamic asset streaming and shared game instances. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 32503–32523 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09612-z

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09612-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation