The Case for Visualization as a Service - Mobile Cloud Gaming as an Example

Abstract

In recent years, significant progress has been made to improve the power efficiency of mobile devices. In particular, new GPU architectures have made it possible to run compute-intensive applications directly on battery-powered mobile devices. In parallel, research is also being conducted in the area of application offloading, the process of running compute-intensive tasks on cloud servers and delivering the results of these computations to mobile devices through their wireless interfaces. It is important to understand the power consumption implications of each of these two options. In this paper, we use mobile cloud gaming as an example to evaluate and compare these two alternatives (running games on the cloud or on mobile devices.) Based on this comparison, we introduce the concept of Visualization as a Service (VaaS) as a new model to design and implement graphics-intensive applications for mobile devices. In this model, advanced visualization capabilities (e. g., interactive visualization of high resolution videos/images) would be provided to mobile users as a service via the Internet. We show through actual hardware specifications that, despite the recent introduction of ultra low power GPUs for mobile devices, it remains far more power efficient to offload graphics-intensive tasks to the cloud. The associated latency can still be tolerated in most applications.