HiPer clouding: high performance cloud gaming

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While Cloud Gaming was already a US$476 million industry in 2015 and is expected to rise by 28% by 2021 with actual industry products such as Sony's PlayStation Now, Valve's Steam, Ubitus's GameNow, G-Cluster, and LiquidSky, to name a few, its success has been slower than expected, due to two main reasons: first, the required bandwidth to achieve acceptable playing quality is quite high. For example, just for a 720p video resolution at 50 fps (quite ordinary and near-minimum for today's gaming standards), Cloud Gaming requires at least 5 Mbps of always-available bandwidth, with 10 Mbs recommended. Second, cloud gaming is very sensitive to network latencies which impair the interactive experience of a game. Unlike video-on-demand, where viewers tolerate even up to a few seconds of interruption and buffering during video play, an interactive game is highly delay sensitive, especially in multiplayer mode. But studies have shown that Cloud Gaming is currently 1.7 times slower than its console counterpart. This is a difficult challenge to overcome since only 70% of end-users are able to meet the 100 ms latency target required. In addition to latency, Cloud Gaming's high variation in latency, known as jitter, has further detrimental effects on Quality of Experience (QoE). Hence, new solutions to reduce the end-to-end delay and jitter must be considered to overcome this challenge.In this proposed project, we will work with Ubique Networks to study and develop new Software Defined Networking (SDN) systems specifically for Cloud Gaming applications, making possible the delivery of satisfactory QoE, real-time and bandwidth-intensive cloud games over future communication networks. Our objectives will be to reduce delay, jitter, and bandwidth needs at all layers of a Cloud Gaming system: within the cloud, within the delivery network between the provider and the user, and at the user's home gateway. The expected outcome will be a complete framework and prototype for optimizing the distribution of network resources throughout the whole Cloud Gaming system.