Cloud gaming: a green solution to massive multiplayer online games

Abstract

Advanced video gaming is a computationally intensive application. Sophisticated graphics renderings are employed in computer games to produce realistic scenes and smooth actions. As a result, video gaming often requires powerful hardware that is beyond the capability of many mobile devices or even personal computers. Meanwhile, playing a high-quality game while on the move is highly desirable with the growing popularity of high-speed mobile and broadband Internet, and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Instead of equipping mobile devices with powerful but battery-hungry computation engines, cloud gaming, which utilizes cloud computing for gaming, offers an emerging green solution to bring the high-quality immersive gaming experience to thin or mobile clients. Cloud gaming leverages communication infrastructures to shift heavy computation to cloud servers. In this article, we provide an overview of cloud gaming from a green media perspective (in addition to the conventional energy perspective). We argue that cloud gaming can lead to less software maintenance, more economical scaling, and longer service life spans of hardware equipment. We also briefly present a novel scheme, layered coding, which leverages the increasing graphics processing capability of a mobile client to reduce the bit rate of game streaming. We then discuss green designs of major cloud gaming subsystems: a cloud data center, graphics rendering, video compression, and network delivery. We review existing services and a testbed for cloud gaming. We also identify potential research challenges of cloud gaming in achieving green media for the future.