SDN-based game-aware network management for cloud gaming

Cloud based video games bring new opportunities to the gaming industry, and enable end-users to play high-end graphic games on any low-end device without high performance hardware requirements. As the major computational parts of game processing, including user´s input processing, rendering and encoding the game scene, and video streaming are performed in data centers, data centers play a key role in providing high quality games to end-users. Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables the management and control of communication inside the data center in a centralized fashion, such that it can be employed as a means to optimize flow distribution. In this paper, we present a Linear Programing (LP) optimization-based method for optimally assigning game servers to gaming sessions and selecting the best communication path within a cloud gaming datacenter. Our optimization model considers the type of requested games, current server loads, and current path delays. Our experimental results show that the proposed model minimizes the average delay of all players within a datacenter by 9.6%, and outperforms the existing server-centric and network-centric models.