Toward Delay-Efficient Game-Aware Data Centers for Cloud Gaming

Gaming on demand is an emerging service that has recently started to garner prominence in the gaming industry. Cloud-based video games provide affordable, flexible, and high-performance solutions for end-users with constrained computing resources and enables them to play high-end graphic games on low-end thin clients. Despite its advantages, cloud gaming's Quality of Experience (QoE) suffers from high and varying end-to-end delay. Since the significant part of computational processing, including game rendering and video compression, is performed in data centers, controlling the transfer of information within the cloud has an important impact on the quality of cloud gaming services. In this article, a novel method for minimizing the end-to-end latency within a cloud gaming data center is proposed. We formulate an optimization problem for reducing delay, and propose a Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) time-efficient heuristic algorithm as a practical solution. Simulation results indicate that the heuristic method can provide close-to-optimal solutions. Also, the proposed model reduces end-to-end delay and delay variation by almost 11% and 13.5%, respectively, and outperforms the existing server-centric and network-centric models. As a byproduct, our proposed method also achieves better fairness among multiple competing players by almost 45%, on average, in comparison with existing methods.