The Brewing Storm in Cloud Gaming: A Measurement Study on Cloud to End-User Latency

Sharon Choy (1) , Bernard Wong (1) , Gwendal Simon (2) , Catherine Rosenberg (1)

1 ECE - Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering [Waterloo]
2 RSM - Département Réseaux, Sécurité et Multimédia

Cloud computing has been a revolutionary force in changing the way organizations deploy web applications and services. However, many of cloud computing's core design tenets, such as consolidating resources into a small number of datacenters and fine-grain partitioning of general purpose computing resources, conflict with an emerging class of mul- timedia applications that is highly latency sensitive and requires specialized hardware, such as graphic processing units (GPUs) and fast memory. In this paper, we look closely at one such application, namely, on-demand gaming (also known as cloud gaming), that has the potential to radically change the multi-billion dollar video game industry. We demonstrate through a large-scale measurement study that the current cloud computing infrastructure is unable to meet the strict latency requirements necessary for acceptable game play for many end-users, thus limiting the number of potential users for an on-demand gaming service. We further investigate the impact of augmenting the current cloud infrastructure with servers located near the end-users, such as those found in content distribution networks, and show that the user coverage significantly increases even with the addition of only a small number of servers.

Mots clés: Cloud gaming; Measurement

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Sharon Choy, Bernard Wong, Gwendal Simon, Catherine Rosenberg. The Brewing Storm in Cloud Gaming: A Measurement Study on Cloud to End-User Latency. NetGames 2012: The 11th ACM Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games, Nov 2012, Venise, Italy. ⟨10.1109/NetGames.2012.6404024⟩. ⟨hal-00786278⟩