Amongst every generation since the 1960’s, video games have been tremendously prominent, evolving every decade with life-like graphics, powerful systems and a larger verity of games to choose from. With the arrival of cloud technology, game accessibility and ubiquity have a bright future as games can be hosted in a centralized server and accessed through the Internet by a thin client on a wide variety of devices with modest capabilities.[1] Cloud gaming or ‘Gaming on Demand’ enables playing visually rich games locally irrespective of the machine’s processing power because the game is hosted on multiple servers and rendered back to the user, frame-by-frame, from powerful machines. This is very helpful for users with less powerful devices that are otherwise incapable of playing high quality games. With this in mind, cloud gaming is not limited to location; servers and players can be located anywhere in the world with networks linking them together. With this configuration, the quality of service in terms of performance and game responsiveness will lag and diminish the players’ Quality of Experience (QoE). QoE describes the service given to the user by the client. Due to these potential advantages, many companies like OnLive, G-Cluster [2], StreamMyGame, Gaikai and T5-Labs are offering cloud gaming services. Also, Sony’s PS Now & Nvidia’s GeForce Now already offer their subscribers a limited library of popular games at 1080p 60fps.[3] Using Riverbed Modeler tools, we design a network configuration to study various scenarios to identify the feasibility of game streaming over Wi-Fi.
[1] L. Royyala “Cloud gaming simulation”. [Online] Available: https://sites.google.com/view/cloudgamingproject .[Accessed: 7th Feb,2020]
[2] R.E. Ewelle, Y. Francillette, G. Mahdi, and A. Gouaïch, “Network Traffic Adaptation For Cloud Games,” International Journal on Cloud Computing: Services and Architecture (IJCCSA) ,Vol.3, No.5, October 2013.
[3] B. Mariano and S.G.M. Koo, “Is cloud gaming the future of the gaming industry?”, in Proc. IEEEICUFN2015, Sapporo, Japan, July 2015, pp. 969-972.
[4] S. Abdulazeez, A. Rhalibi and D. Jumeily, “Simulation of Massively Online Games Communication Using OPNET Custom Application”, ISCC, 2016.
[5] Google inc. “Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Network Topologies”. [Online] Available: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/hybrid-and-multi-cloud-network-topologies . [Accessed 8th Feb, 2020]
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