Mobile Cloud Gaming Systems and Virtual Environments

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Games have indeed turned out to be the "killer app" that has brought virtual environments to the mass market. Online games, which enable millions of players to interact with each other over the network, are now widely used not just for entertainment, but also for socializing, business, commerce, scientific experimentation, and many other practical purposes. Literally millions of people spend their time and money in game worlds such as Second Life, Eve Online, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, or many others. The computer gaming market is therefore huge, and although the industry itself at just over 30 years old is quite young, it has already surpassed the much longer-established film and music industries, generating more revenue than Cinema since 2009 and more revenue than DVD/BlueRay since 2011. Mobile gamin stats are equally impressive. In fact the growth of mobile gaming is happening so quickly that industry observers believe mobile games will change the basis of competition in the gaming industry. Cloud gaming, the newest entry into gaming technology, leverages the well-known concept of cloud computing to provide online gaming services to players, including mobile players who have more computational or download restrictions than players with dedicated game consoles or desktop computers. The idea in cloud gaming is to process the game events in the cloud and to stream the game to the players. Since it uses the cloud, scalability, server bottlenecks, and server failures are alleviated in cloud gaming, helping it become more popular in both research and industry, with companies such as OnLive, StreamMyGame, Gaikai, G-Cluster, OTOY, Spoon, CiiNOW, and others providing commercial cloud gaming services already. In this project, we focus on mobile cloud gaming and we study, design, and develop adaptive, scalable, and energy-aware mobile gaming technologies that will help reduce both the amount of battery consumption in mobile devices and bandwidth generation by the cloud, leading to longer playing time and higher gaming quality for mobile players.