CloudyGame: Enabling cloud gaming on the edge with dynamic asset streaming and shared game instances

摘要

Cloud gaming has emerged as a new computer game delivery paradigm that promises gaming anywhere, anytime, on any device, by running the computer game on a cloud server and streaming the rendered frames to users. To fulfill its promises, a cloud gaming provider must face three main challenges: reducing the interaction latency, reducing the cloud infrastructure cost, and reducing the network bandwidth demand. One way to reduce interaction latency is to run the game on the edge instead of the cloud. This introduces two additional challenges due to the limited resources available on the edge servers. First, there is a high initialization cost to install a game on the edge server if the game that a player wishes to play is not already installed. Second, an edge server typically has limited computing resources compared to the servers in the cloud. In this work, we address these two issues by proposing CloudyGame, a new software architecture for developing computer games, in which (ⅰ) resources are more efficiently shared and managed between different playing instances, and (ⅱ) game assets are streamed on-demand to reduce the initialization cost. CloudyGame is implemented with a popular game engine, and thus any game built on the engine supports CloudyGame out of the box. Our evaluation shows that a game running on CloudyGame architecture needs 70-80% less RAM, VRAM, and CPU than a game using conventional architecture when running with four players. Furthermore, the game asset streaming system reduces the game's initial loading time by 70%. Hence, our cloud gaming architecture is highly scalable and economically deployable to the edge. Further, due to a reduction in resource usage, the CloudyGame architecture would benefit games running in the cloud as well.