GamePod: Persistent Gaming Sessions on Pocketable Storage Devices

We present GamePod, a portable system that enables mobile users to use the same persistent, gaming environment on any available computer. No matter what computer is being used, GamePod provides a consistent gaming environment, maintaining all of a user´s games, including active game state. This is achieved by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. GamePod provides a middleware layer that enables virtualization and checkpoint/restart functionality that decouples the gaming environment from a host machine. This enables gaming sessions to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, and resumed from the storage device on another computer. GamePod´s middleware layer also isolates gaming sessions from the host, protecting the host by preventing malicious executable content from damaging the host. We have implemented a Linux GamePod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume gaming sessions, enabling a seamless gaming experience for mobile users as they move among computers.