Guest editorial: special issue on network and systems support for games

Abstract

A recent market forecast has predicted that the global market for video games will rise to $82 billion in 2017 (http://www. forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/07/18/new-reportsforecasts-global-video-game-industry-will-reach-82-bil lion-by-2017/). The growth is driven by factors including advances in graphics hardware and proliferation of mobile devices. The ubiquity of network connections has also driven up the demand for online gaming, with the market forecasted to reach $35 billion by 2017 (http://www.for bes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/07/18/new-reports-fore casts-global-video-game-industry-will-reach-82-billionby-2017/). This increasing number of game players desire better playing experiences, straining the underlying network and system architecture, and introduces new research questions that require synthesis of a variety of research areas. This special issue focuses on network and systems aspects of games, and covers research and engineering topics that help understand networked games of today and enable the next generation of future networked games. We invited 19 selected papers published in the NetGames 2012 Workshop to expand their work and to submit to the special issue. We also received seven papers that are submitted as a result of the open call for papers. In total, 18 papers have been submitted. After a rigorous reviewing process, we accepted 11 of the submissions to appear in this special issue. The accepted papers cover a wide range of topics in network and systems support for games, including cloud gaming, mobile gaming, and security. Cloud gaming has recently emerged as a new service that offers the possibility to play online games using any terminal, such as a tablet, a smartphone, or a TV screen. The concept is based on cloud computing principles, where most of the processing is achieved in the cloud and the audio/video rendering is streamed to thin terminals. Pushing the complexity toward data centers and network infrastructures offers many advantages to the customers and to the gaming industry, but it also raises many technical and scientific challenges that have recently attracted a growing attention from the researchers and the developers. Addressing these issues requires, as a preliminary step, a better understanding of this emerging service. The first five papers of this special issue address a wide range of important issues related to cloud gaming. The Paper ‘‘Dissecting the Protocol and network Traffic of the OnLive Cloud Gaming platform’’ provides a detailed analysis of the traffic associated to a popular cloud gaming platform. The different phases of the game sessions are identified and the associated data traffic is characterized in terms of bandwidth, packets size and arrival time distributions. Using these observations, the authors propose a very useful mathematical model of cloud gaming traffic. The paper ‘‘On the Performance of OnLive Thin Client Games’’ aims to provide a deep understanding of the traffic associated with cloud gaming, where traffic features are studied and compared to other multimedia services like M. Abdallah (&) Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6), Pierre and Marie Curie University, 4, Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France e-mail: Maha.Abdallah@lip6.fr