Subjective Quality Assessment for Cloud Gaming

Abdul Wahab,Maria G. Martini,John Schormans,Nafi Ahmad

doi:10.3390/j4030031

Abstract

Using subjective testing, we study the effect of the network parameters, delay and packet loss ratio, on the QoE of cloud gaming. We studied three different games, selected based on genre, popularity, content complexity and pace, and tested them in a controlled network environment, using a novel emulator to create realistic lognormal delay distributions instead of relying on a static mean delay, as used previously; we also used Parsec as a good representative of the state of the art. We captured user ratings on an ordinal Absolute Category Rating scale for three quality dimensions: Video QoE, Game-Playability QoE, and Overall QoE. We show that Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for the game with the highest levels of content complexity and pace are most severely affected by network impairments. We also show that the QoE of interactive cloud applications rely more on the game playability than the video quality of the game. Unlike earlier studies, the differences in MOS are validated using the distributions of the underlying dimensions. A Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test showed that the distributions of Video QoE and Game Playability QoE are not significantly different.

Highlights

IntroductionDue to the increased customer interest, tech giants such as Microsoft and Google have introduced their own cloud gaming platforms [1]
Over the last couple of decades, rapid growth in communication technology has brought forward new services such as video streaming and cloud gaming over the internet.Due to the increased customer interest, tech giants such as Microsoft and Google have introduced their own cloud gaming platforms [1]
We presented three different dimensions of quality that can be useful to evaluate the Quality of Experience (QoE) of cloud gaming applications

Summary

Introduction

Due to the increased customer interest, tech giants such as Microsoft and Google have introduced their own cloud gaming platforms [1]. These platforms have millions of paid subscribers and the numbers of subscribers are increasing very rapidly. The user’s device does not need the hardware capability to run the game, since all the rendering of the game will be done at the server-side, saving the user the cost of getting a high-end GPU powered device [2]. This enables many devices such as phones, tablets, and PCs to run high-end hardware intensive games at satisfactory quality

Results

Discussion

Conclusion