A Smart Map Sharing and Preloading Scheme for Mobile Cloud Gaming in D2D Networks

Abstract

With the high popularizing rate of smart devices, mobile gaming is an emerging arena in game industry with the purpose of providing ubiquitous game services to mobile players. Different from the traditional player who play games on their personal computers with wired local area network or WiFi access, more and more mobile players nowadays prefer to play online games on their smart devices that communicate to cloud servers via wireless cellular networks. Therefore, in the mobile cloud gaming context, the monetary cost of downloading or updating map files in games via cellular networks is a new issue that may effect players' experience. On the other hand, an unpredictable latency may be introduced by the wireless links in the cellular network. In fact, a mobile player can preload the maps that he has high probability to go. Moreover, mobile players nearby can also form a device-to-device (D2D) communication network to share their cached maps. In this paper, we consider the problem that with the limited storage space available on each player's device, how to select the maps on either neighboring devices or cloud server to preload so that the utility of the player can be maximized. We first formula an optimization problem and then present our solution. Simulation results show that our proposed map sharing and preloading scheme can significantly increase the utility received by mobile players.