A Cloudlet-Assisted Multiplayer Cloud Gaming System

The unstable network connectivity is the bottleneck of providing Gaming as a service (GaaS) for mobile devices. Therefore, the most critical technical challenge is to compress and transmit the real-time gaming video, so that during the gaming session, the expected server transmission rate over the bandwidth-limited mobile network can be minimized, while satisfying the quality of experience for the players. Inspired by the idea of peer-to-peer sharing between multiple players, we propose a cloudlet-assisted multiplayer cloud gaming system, in which the mobile devices are connected to the cloud server for real-time interactive game videos, while sharing the received video frames with their peers via an ad hoc cloudlet. Experimental results show that expected server transmission rate can be significantly reduced compared to the conventional video encoding schemes for cloud games.