Resource optimization through hierarchical SDN-enabled inter data center network for cloud gaming

Abstract

Gaming on demand is an emerging service that combines techniques from Cloud Computing and Online Gaming. This new paradigm is garnering prominence in the gaming industry and leading to a new anywhere and anytime online gaming model. Despite its advantages, cloud gaming's Quality of Experience (QoE) is challenged by high and varying end-to-end communication delay. Since the significant part of the computational processing, including game rendering and video compression, is performed on the cloud, properly allocating game requests to the geographically distributed data centers (DCs) can lead to QoE improvements resulting from lower delays. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical Software Defined Network (SDN) controller architecture to near-optimally allocate a gaming session to a DC while minimizing network delay and maximizing bandwidth utilization. To do so, we formulate an optimization problem, and propose the Online Convex Optimization (OCO) as a practical solution. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can provide close-to-optimal solutions, and outperforms classic offline techniques e.g. Lagrangean relaxation. In addition, the proposed model improves the bandwidth utilization of DCs, and reduces end-to-end delay and delay variation by gamers. As a byproduct, our proposed method also achieves better fairness among multiple competing players in comparison with existing methods.