Cloud Gaming: Implications of cloud

17-04-2019
gaming, shifting towards
servitization in the gaming industry

Literature Review Project

Module 5 – New Media
University of Twente, Enschede
2.461 words
Krol, Zanur Marluc Thierry
S2005514
Abstract
Technology on cloud gaming have become somewhat reality, with many implications resolved and
big announcements from companies such as Google to offer service on cloud gaming in the near
future, cloud gaming is more alive than ever.
Even though there have been many solutions proposed to the implications surrounding the
technology, the technology is still in its infancy and therefore an interesting topic to look into.
This paper is a literature review with the aim to show implications of cloud gaming that have been
resolved or are still existing problems.

Background
Nowadays as the world gets more connected and computers can be found anywhere, gaming on low-
end devices becomes more applicable in every situation.
Normally, gaming requires high computational power which made it only able for high-end devices,
especially graphical intensive games were only suitable for high-end computers. However, with the
rise of cloud gaming, many games that once required a good Graphical Processing Unit (GPU), now
do not require any.
This is all due to improvements being done in the field of cloud gaming, that enables users to play
heavy games through elsewhere located GPU’s.
Cloud gaming, in its simplest form, renders an interactive gaming application remotely in the cloud
and streams the scenes as a video sequence back to the player over the Internet (Shea, Liu, Ngai, &
Cui, 2013).
The main benefit of cloud gaming is essentially that gaming becomes available to those with devices
not fit for heavy computational tasks, such as low-end computers, laptops and mobile devices. [1]
Wherever there is a trend or potential, startups are created to address it. This was and still is also the
case for the industry of cloud gaming. Big companies resulted, such as: Gaikai, GeForce Now, Onlive
and the lately announced Google Stadia. They all are trying to create a product/service similar to
Netflix’ popular online streaming service.
As this fairly new opportunity in gaming is still in its infancy, there is a lot of research being done in
order to aid this technology. Since I believed in the possibility to create a business for this
opportunity as well (a little bit too late) I was drawn to research this topic. The implications of the
technology and future applications seemed really interesting to me.
This resulted in the following research question:
“What are the implications of multiplayer cloud gaming technology?”

Keywords / jargon:
Latency This is a word used to specify the connection between two servers in ms.
(milliseconds), a high latency indicates a bad connection.
Edge/Fog computing Cloud computing with the use of datacentres as close as possible to the user
in order to increase speed for computing.
VM (Virtual Machines) a separate computer/server (or more), created by
software on one physical device.

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Method
In order to get a better understanding of the topic, literature about cloud gaming was researched.
The first search was on Google Scholar, and resulted in a not so interesting article only used to get
some basic understanding, therefore later Scopus was used, which gave much better results. All the
other literature used in this research was found through Scopus.
The following query was used “Cloud AND gaming” which resulted in a lot of articles. Because this
was only for the introduction, the abstract of a couple was read and selected to research further.
Date Query Literature
11-03 Cloud gaming via Scopus NR-GVQM: A No Reference Gaming Video Quality Metric
11-03 Cloud gaming via Scholar Cloud Gaming: Architecture and performance

After selecting two articles to base my introduction on, the research question was formulated and
more literature was sought. This time focusing on possible future applications and implications.
Below are listed the queries used and the related documents found:
Date Query Literature
23-03 Cloud AND gaming AND future Edge Computing for the internet of things: a case
study
23-03 Cloud AND gaming AND future Fog Computing Potentials, Applications and
challenges
23-03 Cloud AND gaming AND future Improvement of Response Time by Running
Games on a Cloud Gaming System with Layer
Catcher and Movement Prediction 1

However these articles did not really fit in the scope of the project. Yet the literature used for “Edge
computing for the internet of things” was looked through and some useful articles where found on
03-04-2019, these are listed below:
- The server Allocation Problem for session-based Multiplayer Cloud Gaming
- Placing Virtual Machines to Optimize Cloud Gaming Experience
- GamingAnywhere: The First Open Source Cloud Gaming System
When looking at the latter article, it was part of the Journal ‘IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CLOUD
COMPUTING’ which then was looked through and resulted in 2 more interesting articles:
- Gazing into the crystall Ball: when the future internet meets the mobile clouds, Vol. 7, No. 1
- Ad-hoc cloudlet based cooperative cloud gaming, Vol. 6, No. 3 (eventually not used)
Some of these articles at first seemed promising, while later did not turned out to be very useful,
work used in these articles which connected more to the topic was looked into. Resulting in the
following literature on 17-04-2019:
- “The akamai network: a platform for high-performance internet applications 2

1
Written in Spanish and therefore apart from the abstract not used.
2
Resulted from the article “Fog Computing Potentials, Applications and challenges”

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Summary
As mentioned in the introduction, there are a lot of implications to be overcome when developing
cloud gaming known as it is now. Such implications were mainly:
- Network latency
- Bandwith problems
- Server allocation
- Commercialization
All these implications were measured against a certain aspect of gaming, the metric of Quality of
Experience for the player. Which was required to be the same as when people play a game on a high-
end device, or at least not noticeably less. Different metrics for QoE and solutions to specific
applications were proposed, yet the technology is still not very commonly used for heavy game.
In this summary the following articles as solutions for the aforementioned implications are discussed:
- The server allocation problem for session-based multiplayer cloud gaming
- Placing Virtual Machines to Optimize Cloud Gaming Experience
- NR-GVQM: A no reference gaming video quality metric
- Gazing into the crystal ball when the future internet meets the mobile clouds
- Fog computing potentials, applications and challenges
Implications: server/hardware allocation problem in combination with cost-effectiveness [1]
As the hardware in servers renders the game based on the game input commands such as mouse
clicks, key presses etc. The thin client on the user’s computer is solely used to display the stream of
the game render back to the player. Figure 1 shows the process of cloud gaming that poses rendering
at the server and a thin client for streaming the service.
The problem Is that it the hardware
requirements differ per game played, a simpler
2D game doesn’t require the same cutting-edge
GPU requirements a 3D game would need. This
introduces the allocation of servers and
hardware to the right player/game.
Not only for efficient usage of hardware, right
allocation of servers is required, also in order to
keep low network latency, high QoE and reduce
server-, energy- and bandwith costs.
This topic therefore is extensively researched,
Figure 1 Process of Cloud gaming mentioned by (Shea, Liu,
where the focus of research lies on many of
Ngai, & Cui, 2013)
these aspects like how to minimize energy
consumption while guaranteeing performance requirements considering price fluctuations 3,
minimizing cloud server rental and bandwith usage while satisfying the real-time delay constraint
among clients and how to establish a well-provisioned inter-datacenter connection to reduce
communication latency from clients to server 4 are among such studies.
The work done by (Deng, Li, Seet, Tang, & Cai, 2018) proposes a solution for server allocation that
takes into account two servers, a game server and a render server. It is difficult to form a steady
connection that preservers QoE since it requires the latency of each player to the render server to be

3
Researched by [12-15] from Server allocation article
4
Researched by [25] from Server allocation article

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below a certain treshold and on top of that, the connection latency from the game server through
the render server must be below a certain treshold as well.
The algorithm they propose focuses on these tresholds and try to relocate the render servers for
each player in different ways in order to connect such a good connection. The three ways proposed
are Lowest-Amortized-Cost (LAC), Lowest-Capacity-Wastage (LCW) and Lowest-Combined-Prices
(LCP). These are then compared against the nearest assignment- and random assignment algorithm.
All algorithms produce consistent better solutions with the LAC algorithm as the cost-effective. It
assigns players to a game and render server which has latencies below a specified treshold and takes
into account the server price, bandwith price and capacity wastage 5.
The work of (Hong, Chen, Huang, Chen, & Hsu, 2015) also focuses on creating a cost-effectiveness of
cloud gaming, by proposing the solution of establishing multiple cloud gaming servers on a physical
machine using Virtual Machines (VM). The use of VM helps make offering cloud gaming more
profitable for businesses. Since as of now, most services providing cloud gaming has been closed, due
to financial issues. The idea proposed is the use of a physical server connected to a broker which
operates as a middleman to create and distribute virtual servers. The algorithm of creating and
distributing these virtual servers takes into account network latency, game and player requirements
in order to offer the QoE just good enough performance, while providing as many players, thus
increasing profitability. [2]
Metrics are being used to determine a players’ gaming experience. The metric established by
(Zadtootaghaj, Barman, Schmidt, Martini, & Möller, 2018) creates a metric through machine learning
which provides the possibility to decrease computation time of rendering the game. It does this by
reducing specific features of video streaming that do not contribute that much to a players QoE. The
features extracted from streaming for computational improvements are: natural image quality
evaluator (NIQE); blind image quality index (BIQI); blind/referenceless image spatial quality evaluator
(BRISQUE); spatial index (SI); temporal index (TI); noise; blurriness; blockiness; contrast.
If computation time is reduced due to the reduction of certain aspects of rendering, streaming
becomes smoother which increases a users’ experience with the service and reduces both workload
and bandwidth. [3]
The future improvements applications of cloud computing are mainly researched within the article of
(Piro, et al., 2019), yet there is mentioned that cloud gaming becomes more widespread, since the
cost of enabling such services would be reduced due to the improvements being done to cloud
computing overall. These improvements include virtualization of main drivers, also mentioned before
within more detail. Improvements in the architecture of cloud computing/cloud gaming networks
and solutions to security issues. Whereas of now, the cloud platform is mentioned as the bottleneck
of the process, all is depending on the cloud servers. Future-MCC networks however should be able
to overcome these issues, through more optimized algorithms to create and distribute available
networks. Reducing cost and increasing availability. Furthermore, it describes implications as ever
more increasing data transferred and the problem with multiple servers (multiple times data is
required to be distributed) therefore improvements needed to be done to contain bandwith
constraints. [4]
The work off (Haouari, Faraj, & AlJa'am, Fog Computing Potentials, 2018) shows potential of edge/fog
computing, for multiple applications such as smart cities, travel, health care and multimedia
applications as well. Fog computing minimizes latency, which makes it also useful for multi-player

5
Note that the solutions do not take the power usage and costs into account and latency is only used as a
metric to determine allocation.

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games. The application of fog computation used for multimedia purposes is more researched by (E.
Nygren, R. K. Sitaraman, J. Sun, 2010) therefore this study was more carefully examined. [5]
The article addresses a couple of requirements of edge computing for the multimedia sector,
scalability of video-grade, video performance and transportation of data, which all would be
increased drastically if everything gets computed on the edge. Akamai provided such service and
were able to increase performance drastically for many situations. If the network used in the case of
Akamai (edge computing) were used for gaming, performance would increase drastically as well, yet
there would still be problems, mentioned before. [6]

Conclusion
There were and are still many implications to be overcome for cloud computing in general and
especially cloud gaming to be applicable for the masses. The main problems are feasibility, network
distribution, bandwith constraints and maintaining good QoE for the user.
It is all these problems combined that result in not a really successful company that offers cloud
gaming as a service yet. There have been many whom have tried and failed. When current
implications can be solved, making it cost-efficient and profitable, cloud gaming is believed to be the
new form of gaming and widely accepted since there are many benefits for users.
Many solutions are proposed to individual problems, but no real solution that combines all aspects of
the implications surrounding cloud gaming technology have been proposed, making cloud gaming
still a thing for the near-future. As it is heavily researched and many companies are working on it, it is
an interesting market to research and keep track of.
As future work for this topic it would be great if all the implications combined could be tackled and
solved, resulting in a service of cloud gaming for the masses.

List of References
[1] Deng, Y., Li, Y., Seet, R., Tang, X., & Cai, W. (2018, May). The server allocation problem for session-
based multiplayer cloud gaming. IEE transactions on multimedia, vol 20, no 5.

[2] Hong, H.-J., Chen, D.-Y., Huang, C.-Y., Chen, K.-T., & Hsu, C.-H. (2015, January - march). Placing
virtual machines to optimize cloud gaming experience. IEEE transactions on cloud computing,
Vol. 3, No. 1.

[3] Zadtootaghaj, S., Barman, N., Schmidt, S., Martini, M., & Möller, S. (2018). NR-GVQM: A No
Reference Gaming Video Quality Metric. IEEE.

[4] Piro, G., Amadeo, M., Boggia, G., Campolo, C., Alfredo Grieco, L., Molinaro, A., & Ruggeri, G.
(2019, January-March). Gazing into the crystal ball: when the future internet meets the
mobile clouds. IEEE Transactions on cloud computing, Vol. 7, No. 1.

[5] Haouari, F., Faraj, R., & AlJa'am, J. (2018). Fog Computing Potentials, Applications and challenges.
International Conference on computer and applications (ICCA).

[6] E. Nygren, R. K. Sitaraman, and J. Sun, “The akamai network: a platform for high-performance
internet applications,” ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 9–19, 2010.
[7] Shea, R., Liu, J., Ngai, E.-H., & Cui, Y. (2013, July/August). Cloud Gaming: Architecture and
performance. IEEE.