Addressing Response Time and Video Quality in Remote Server Based Internet Mobile Gaming

A new remote server based gaming approach, where the responsibility of executing the gaming engines is put on remote servers instead of the mobile devices, has the potential for enabling mobile users to play the same rich Internet games available to PC users. However, the mobile gaming user experience may be limited by risks of unacceptably high response time, and low gaming video quality, as gaming control commands, and the resulting gaming video, have to travel through wireless networks characterized by high bandwidth fluctuations, latency and packet loss. In this paper, we propose a set of application layer optimization techniques to ensure acceptable gaming response time and video quality in the remote server based approach. The techniques include downlink gaming video rate adaptation, uplink delay optimization, and client play-out delay adaptation. Experiments conducted on a commercial HSDPA network demonstrate that the proposed optimization techniques can make the remote server based approach feasible, allowing rich Internet games to be played on mobile devices, while ensuring acceptable user experience.