Gamelets — Multiplayer mobile games with distributed micro-clouds

In recent years, cloud computing services have been increasing in greater pace. High penetration rate of mobile devices and resource limited devices escalate the demand for cloud services further [1], [2]. Even though the cloud industry continues to grow exponentially, the cloud gaming service has been left behind due to the limitations in today´s technology. There are three well known reasons for the slower growth - latency, server scalability (esp. bandwidth) and lack of game data at client side to use latency hiding and synchronisation techniques such as Dead-reckoning. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed micro-cloud infrastructure with a next generation device called Gamelet to mitigate the limitations in traditional cloud system for multiplayer cloud gaming on resource limited mobile devices. The paper also investigates the opportunities, issues and possible solutions for Gamelet infrastructure for mobile games with a demonstrable prototype.