Wireless network aware cloud scheduler for scalable cloud mobile gaming

Abstract

Cloud Mobile Gaming (CMG) [1][10][11] has been proposed as an approach to enable rich Internet games on mobile devices, where the rendering of the games is performed on cloud servers, as opposed to on mobile devices. Though promising, the CMG approach may require significant cloud computing resources for the concurrent gaming sessions, and even more critically, significant bandwidth for delivering the rendered videos back to mobile devices, leading to high cloud costs, and questions regarding resource constrained wireless networks. This paper addresses the problem of making the CMG approach scalable and economically feasible by proposing a novel Wireless Cloud Scheduler (WCS), which can increase the number of simultaneous CMG sessions that can be supported while ensuring Mobile Gaming User Experience (MGUE)[1] with the available wireless network resources, while minimizing the cloud service cost incurred by the CMG provider. Unlike conventional network schedulers, WCS considers simultaneously the constraints of the wireless networks that may be available to each CMG user, including cellular and WiFi, as well as the cost of available cloud resources, while scheduling the most optimal wireless link and cloud server for each CMG session. To further enhance the performance of WCS, we also propose a joint scheduling-adaptation algorithm, that can systematically leverage adaptation techniques introduced in [10][11] to adapt the communication needs of in-service users if the available wireless network bandwidth is not sufficient for a new CMG user. Our simulation results demonstrate that the use of WCS, and the joint scheduling-adaptation algorithm, can significantly improve the performance of the CMG approach, increasing the number of simultaneous CMG sessions that can be supported, while maximizing aggregate MGUE and minimizing the average cloud service cost.