Our paper, titled as "A cost-efficient cloud gaming system at scale" is accpeted by the IEEE Network Magazine in its special issue on Transparent and Edge Computing. This work is under the joint efforts from Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Yun Ge Zhi Li, Inc.
Abstract:
This article proposes a Transparent Gaming (TG) cloud system that allows the users to play any popular highend desktop games on-the-fly over the Internet. Towards this goal, we have introduced the TG-SHARE technology to share the underlying hardware capabilities, particularly for the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) and the dedicated Compression Acceleration Unit (XCODER). TG-SHARE utilizes the off-the-shelf consumer GPUs without resorting to the expensive proprietary GPU virtualization technology (such as GRID from NVIDIA). XCODER adapts the compression based on the network dynamics, learned gaming behaviors and hardware resources to significantly reduce the bandwidth consumption. Google’s webRTC protocol is integrated to offer the real-time interaction and ubiquitous accesses from heterogeneous devices. Compared with the existing cloud gaming vendor using the GRID technology, our TG-SHARE not only reduces the expense per user (i.e., 75% hardware cost reduction, 20%-40% network cost reduction), but also improves the quality of experiences (QoE) with higher rate of frames per second (FPS) (i.e., 2x FPS).