Cloud gaming or Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) attracted the attention since 2000s. GaaS was promised to offer gaming on the fly anytime and anywhere. It is analogous to the rise of Netflix, where conventional DVD rental services were completely replaced by live video streaming services for movies and TVs. However, for past years, there hasn’t been any successful GaaS example, mainly due to the unaffordable service provisioning expense, high network bandwidth & latency, and unsatisfied quality of experience (QoE). Thanks to the recent advances in networking and computing technologies, particularly the emerging 5G wireless, industry leaders, and tech pioneers have foreseen the potential of GaaS, leading to the launches of several well-known GaaS, such as Google Stadia, Microsoft Project xCloud, Tencent Start, Shadow, AnyGame, etc.
Nevertheless, to ensure the smooth and uncompromised GaaS to a large number of concurrent gaming subscriptions, numerous explorations have been made and still continue in academia and industry, including designs or schemes of rendering architectures, compression strategies, streaming protocols, as well as QoE optimizations. Over the last few years, our group has devoted efforts to designing and promoting GaaS in many aspects, including system prototyping, algorithm optimization, and commercialization. Key motivations of our work are trying to enforce the “Transparent” gaming mode for both content providers and users, at a reasonable cost with uncompromised QoE.
Architecture
Algorithm
AI-Driven Optimization
Relevant Publications:
Hao Chen, Ming Lu, Zhan Ma, Xu Zhang, Yiling Xu, Qiu Shen, and Wenjun Zhang, Learned Resolution Scaling Powered Gaming-as-a-Service at Scale, in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 23, pp. 584-596, 2021.
Hao Chen, Xu Zhang, Yiling Xu, Ju Ren, Jingtao Fan, Zhan Ma, and Wenjun Zhang, "T-Gaming: A Cost-Efficient Cloud Gaming System at Scale", accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed System, June 2019. [draft][This work has been adopted into a commercialized AnyGame to support thousands of gaming users every day!]
Xu Zhang, Hao Chen, Yangchao Zhao, Zhan Ma, Yiling Xu, Haojun Huang, Hao Yin, and Dapeng Wu, "Improving Cloud Gaming Experience through Mobile Edge Computing", accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, 2019. [draft]
Yiling Xu, Qiu Shen, Xin Li, and Zhan Ma, "A cost-efficient cloud gaming system at scale", in IEEE Network, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 42-47, Jan.-Feb. 2018.
Zhan Ma, Tao Yue, Xun Cao, Yiling Xu, Xin Li, and Yongjin Wang, "Interactive Screen Video Streaming Based Pervasive Mobile Workstyle", IEEE Trans. Multimedia, vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 2322-2332, Oct. 2017.