Accelerated video streaming for gaming architecture

In coming years we will see low cost networked consumer electronics (CE) devices dominating the living room. Various applications will be offered, including IPTV, VoIP, VoD, PVR and others. With regards to gaming and highly interactive multimedia applications, the need to compete with PlayStation and Xbox will require a radical change in system architecture. The Games@Large Integrated Project’s (IP) mission is to research, develop and implement a new platform aimed at providing users with a richer variety of entertainment experience in familiar environments, such as their entire house, hotel room, cruise ships and Internet Café. This will support ubiquitous gameplay throughout such environments, while taking advantage of existing hardware and providing multiple members of the family and community the ability to play simultaneously and to share experiences. This paper focuses on the most innovative Games@Large ideas, such as multiple games execution on the Games Gateway and delivery of graphic rendering metadata over the network via low latency and low bandwidth Pre-Rendering Protocol. A model of the system architecture is presented and the specific properties of Pre-Rendering protocol are outlined.

2019

The present paper mainly focuses on review of cloud gaming. In cloud gaming, sophisticated game runs on powerful servers in data centers, rendered game scenes are streamed to gamers over the Internet in real-time, and gamers use lightweight software executed on devices to interact with the games. Computer games used to take more time to get installed on Computer systems as games are too complicated and the computer hardware has low specifications. Gamers have to repeatedly upgrade their computers to play latest computer games. Cloud gaming is a system that has the potential to make virtually any video game, regardless of system requirements, to be played on almost any system.

2020

Cloud computing is an information technology model that provides access to system resources with higher level of services capability. These resources are considered reliable, flexible and affordable for many types of applications and users. Gaming industry is one filed that gained benefits of cloud computing as new cloud gaming architectures have been introduced. Many advantages of cloud gaming have affected the success of gaming according to the improvements on traditional online gaming. However, cloud gaming suffers from several drawbacks such as the huge amount of required video processing and the computational complexity needed. This paper shows the original system drawbacks and devises a new and novel algorithm for speeding up the encoding process and reducing the computational complexity. Improvements on the video codec led to 41% speeding up on the total encoding time with negligible loss of users’ satisfactions.

2014 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo Workshops (ICMEW), 2014

In cloud-based video gaming systems, game engines are hosted in the cloud, and rendered gaming scenes are streamed to players over the Internet. In such systems, the tasks of rendering graphics and video encoding impose huge computational complexity on cloud servers. Therefore, speeding up the encoding process to meet the stringent requirements of the game becomes a critical issue in cloudbased video gaming systems. In this paper, we analyze the feasibility of developing a mechanism to accelerate the power-intensive process of video encoding, by using available game objects information in game engines. Specifically, we utilize the game engine's information about the motion of the objects within the scene in order to bypass the time-consuming procedure of Motion Estimation (ME) in conventional video encoders like H.264/AVC. Based on our analysis, the game engine's information could be usable inside a video encoder if an interface is involved to re-shape object information and make them compatible for the video encoder. Our experiments show that our approach accelerates the motion estimation process by 14.32% on average for two specific games, when object's information is taken into account during the encoding phase.

Multimedia Systems, 2014

Multimedia Systems, 2014

Computer games stand to benefit from ''cloud'' technology by doing heavy-weight, graphics-intensive computations at the server, sending only the visual game frames down to a thin client, with the client sending only the player actions upstream to the server. However, computer games tend to be graphically intense with fast-paced user actions necessitating bitrates and update frequencies that may stress end-host networks. Understanding the traffic characteristics of thin client games is important for building traffic models and traffic classifiers, as well as adequately planning network infrastructures to meet future demand. While there have been numerous studies detailing online game traffic and streaming video traffic, this paper provides the first detailed study of the network characteristic of OnLive, a commercially available thin client game system. Carefully designed experiments measure OnLive game traffic for several game genres, analyzing the bitrates, packet sizes and inter-packet times for both upstream and downstream game traffic, and analyzing frame rates for the games. Results indicate OnLive rapidly sends large packets downstream, similar but still significantly different than live video. Upstream, OnLive less frequently sends much smaller packets, significantly different than upstream traditional game client traffic. OnLive supports only the top frame rates with high-capacity end-host connections, but provides good frame rates with moderate end-host connections. The results should be a useful beginning to building effective traffic models and traffic classifiers and for preparing end-host networks to support this upcoming generation of computer games.

2008 15th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2008

In this paper, we present a graphics streaming system for remote gaming in a local area network. The framework aims at creating a networked game platform for home and hotel environments. A local PC based server executes a computer game and streams the graphical output to local devices in the rooms, such that the users can play everywhere in the network. Since delay is extremely crucial in interactive gaming, efficient encoding and caching of the commands is necessary. In our system we also address the round trip time problem of commands requiring feedback from the graphics board by simulating the graphics state at the server. This results in a system that enables interactive game play over the network.

This paper presents Games@Large - a new system for pervasive gaming and multimedia and describes its components, which are relevant to the testing and evaluation of the system design. Complex gaming and multimedia frameworks comprise multitude of elements: heterogeneous end user devices, wireless and wired network technologies, and various multimedia and gaming services. They enable an easy access to the offered services through the use of a versatile system architecture. Testing and evaluating the design of the system takes central stage in the project through an iterative process which has a great impact on overall design course and the final product in terms of assuring a proper Quality of Service and usability of the system. The analysis of system elements and their testing and evaluation methods will facilitate the development of the methodology for the purpose of verification of the different components and the entertainment system as an integrated whole. The subsequent step of this analysis is an adaptation of the metrics, used for video game and multimedia evaluation, which will develop a comprehensive testing and evaluation methodology for newly evolving entertainment systems.

2004

In this paper, we present an approach to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for networked mobile gaming. In order to examine the QoS requirements of mobile games, we ported a simple real-time game called GAV (GPL Arcade Volleyball) to a PDA and performed several traffic measurements over both GPRS and UMTS networks. We show that due to high end-to-end delay and delay jitter, realtime games are not supported by GPRS. While UMTS improves both delay and jitter, it still does not match the requirements of real-time games. The key reason for this problem is that overprovisioning, as it is used to allow real-time games in the Internet, is very expensive in mobile networks. At the same time, QoS classes for mobile networks are not tailored to real-time games. In order to reduce delay and jitter for this application class, while still accounting for the very bursty nature of real-time game flows, we propose to use a combination of statistical multiplexing and QoS guarantees. The general idea is to aggregate multiple game flows and perform reservation for that aggregate. As a theoretical background, we use a queuing system based model. Through simulation of a sample network with the traffic data generated by GAV, we validate our assumptions and demonstrate the performance and characteristics of our approach.