Cloud Gaming: Understanding the Support From Advanced Virtualization and Hardware

Existing cloud gaming platforms have mainly focused on private nonvirtualized environments with proprietary hardware. Modern public cloud platforms heavily rely on virtualization for efficient resource sharing, the potentials of which have yet to be explored. Migrating gaming to a public cloud is nontrivial, however, particularly considering the overhead for virtualization and that the graphics processing units (GPUs) for game rendering has long been an obstacle in virtualization. This paper takes a first step toward bridging the online gaming system and the public cloud platforms. We present the design and implementation of a fully virtualized cloud gaming platform with the latest hardware support for both remote servers and local clients. We explore many critical design issues inherent in cloud gaming, including the choice of hardware or software video encoding, and the configuration and the detailed power consumption of thin client. We demonstrate that with the latest hardware and virtualization support, gaming over virtualized cloud can be made possible with careful optimization and integration of the different modules. We also highlight critical challenges toward full-fledged deployment of gaming services over the public virtualized cloud.