An SDN Controller for Delay and Jitter Reduction in Cloud Gaming

Abstract

Cloud gaming is an emerging service that has recently started to garner prominence in the gaming industry. 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 paper, we make two contributions: we propose a design to apply the recent paradigm of Software Defined Networks (SDNs) to Cloud Gaming, and we propose an SDN controller that reduces end-to-end delay and delay variations experienced by players. Our SDN controller adaptively disperses the game traffic load among different network paths according to their corresponding end-to-end delays. Experimental results show that our proposed controller reduces end-to-end delay and delay variation by almost 9% and 50% respectively without engendering additional packet loss, compared to a representative conventional method: Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). These reductions lead to improvements in players' gaming experience.