A Survey of Bandwidth and Latency Enhancement Approaches for Mobile Cloud Game Multicasting
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paper_title: Energy-efficient gaming on mobile devices using dead reckoning-based power management

paper_content:

We address the issue of how to reduce energy consumption of the wireless interface during multiplayer gaming sessions on mobile devices. Reducing energy consumed by the wireless interface is achieved by putting it in a low-energy state when it is not used. We leverage the dead reckoning technique used in existing games. In dead reckoning, future locations of objects in a game are estimated based on their current locations and velocities. The difference between the extrapolated and true locations is known as the dead reckoning error. We propose an algorithm that employs the dead reckoning error rate to dynamically control the state of the wireless interface. We implement our algorithm into a dead reckoning simulator that is based on a real open-source game. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 36% energy savings for mobile devices. Our proposed algorithm is practical because it does not require much additional code and it allows easy integration with existing games.
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paper_title: Blue Banana: resilience to avatar mobility in distributed MMOGs

paper_content:

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) recently emerged as a popular class of applications with millions of users. To offer acceptable gaming experience, such applications need to render the virtual world surrounding the player with a very low latency. However, current state-of-the-art MMOGs based on peer-to-peer overlays fail to satisfy these requirements. This happens because avatar mobility implies many data exchanges through the overlay. As state-of-the-art overlays do not anticipate this mobility, the needed data is not delivered on time, which leads to transient failures at the application level. To solve this problem, we propose Blue Banana, a mechanism that models and predicts avatar movement, allowing the overlay to adapt itself by anticipation to the MMOG needs. Our evaluation is based on large-scale traces derived from Second life. It shows that our anticipation mechanism decreases by 20% the number of transient failures with only a network overhead of 2%.
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paper_title: G-COPSS: A Content Centric Communication Infrastructure for Gaming Applications

paper_content:

Information-Centric Networking provides substantial flexibility for users to obtain information without knowing the source of information or its current location. With users increasingly focused on an online world, an emerging challenge for the network infrastructure is to support Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Currently, MMORPG is built on IP infrastructure with the primary responsibility resting on servers for disseminating control messages and predicting/retrieving objects belonging to each player's view. Scale and timeliness are major challenges of such a server-oriented gaming architecture. Limited server resources significantly impair the user's interactive experience, requiring game implementations to limit the number of players in a single game instance. We propose Gaming over COPSS (G-COPSS), a distributed communication infrastructure using a Content-Oriented Pub/Sub System (COPSS) to enable efficient decentralized information dissemination in MMORPG, jointly exploiting the network and end-systems for player management and information dissemination. G-COPSS aims to scale well in the number of players in a single game, while still meeting users' response time requirements. We have implemented G-COPSS on top of the open-source CCNx implementation. We use a simple game with a hierarchical map to carefully micro benchmark the implementation and the processing involved in managing game dynamics. We have also micro benchmarked the game based on NDN and a server with an IP infrastructure. We emulate an application that is particularly emblematic of MMORPG -- Counter-Strike -- but one in which all players share a hierarchical structured map. Using trace-driven simulation, we demonstrate that G-COPSS can achieve high scalability and tight timeliness requirements of MMORPG. The simulator is parameterized based on micro benchmarks of our implementation. Our evaluations show that G-COPSS provides orders of magnitude improvement in update latency and a factor of two reduction in aggregate network load compared to a server-based implementation.
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paper_title: Evaluating dead reckoning variations with a multi-player game simulator

paper_content:

One of the most difficult tasks when creating an online multi-player game is to provide the players with a consistent view of the virtual world despite the network delays. Most current games use prediction algorithms to achieve this, but usually it does not go beyond applying the DIS [2] dead reckoning algorithm proposed in the mid-90s. In this paper we introduce a simulator called GLS that allows us to evaluate different aspects of DIS and its variations. We examine the impact of prediction and clock synchronization on game consistency. We also evaluate the convergence algorithm we introduce here. Furthermore we look into ways for compensating increasing delays to keep the player's view of the game state sufficiently consistent with other players.
---
paper_title: Energy-efficient gaming on mobile devices using dead reckoning-based power management

paper_content:

We address the issue of how to reduce energy consumption of the wireless interface during multiplayer gaming sessions on mobile devices. Reducing energy consumed by the wireless interface is achieved by putting it in a low-energy state when it is not used. We leverage the dead reckoning technique used in existing games. In dead reckoning, future locations of objects in a game are estimated based on their current locations and velocities. The difference between the extrapolated and true locations is known as the dead reckoning error. We propose an algorithm that employs the dead reckoning error rate to dynamically control the state of the wireless interface. We implement our algorithm into a dead reckoning simulator that is based on a real open-source game. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 36% energy savings for mobile devices. Our proposed algorithm is practical because it does not require much additional code and it allows easy integration with existing games.
---
paper_title: G-COPSS: A Content Centric Communication Infrastructure for Gaming Applications

paper_content:

Information-Centric Networking provides substantial flexibility for users to obtain information without knowing the source of information or its current location. With users increasingly focused on an online world, an emerging challenge for the network infrastructure is to support Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Currently, MMORPG is built on IP infrastructure with the primary responsibility resting on servers for disseminating control messages and predicting/retrieving objects belonging to each player's view. Scale and timeliness are major challenges of such a server-oriented gaming architecture. Limited server resources significantly impair the user's interactive experience, requiring game implementations to limit the number of players in a single game instance. We propose Gaming over COPSS (G-COPSS), a distributed communication infrastructure using a Content-Oriented Pub/Sub System (COPSS) to enable efficient decentralized information dissemination in MMORPG, jointly exploiting the network and end-systems for player management and information dissemination. G-COPSS aims to scale well in the number of players in a single game, while still meeting users' response time requirements. We have implemented G-COPSS on top of the open-source CCNx implementation. We use a simple game with a hierarchical map to carefully micro benchmark the implementation and the processing involved in managing game dynamics. We have also micro benchmarked the game based on NDN and a server with an IP infrastructure. We emulate an application that is particularly emblematic of MMORPG -- Counter-Strike -- but one in which all players share a hierarchical structured map. Using trace-driven simulation, we demonstrate that G-COPSS can achieve high scalability and tight timeliness requirements of MMORPG. The simulator is parameterized based on micro benchmarks of our implementation. Our evaluations show that G-COPSS provides orders of magnitude improvement in update latency and a factor of two reduction in aggregate network load compared to a server-based implementation.
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Title: A Survey of Bandwidth and Latency Enhancement Approaches for Mobile Cloud Game Multicasting

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: Introduce the growth of mobile gaming, its challenges, and the need for efficient multicasting methods to address bandwidth and latency issues.

Section 2: PROPOSED APPROACHES
Description 2: Present various state-of-the-art methods for improving network efficiency in mobile games to enhance user experience and resource saving.

Section 3: Multiple Transmission
Description 3: Describe the method of sending lost packets multiple times to ensure important data transmission despite bandwidth reduction.

Section 4: Avatar Blinking
Description 4: Explain the approach that provides an immediate visual feedback in the form of blinking avatars to counteract latency.

Section 5: Dead-Reckoning
Description 5: Discuss the technique of predicting avatar movements and actions to mitigate the effects of lost packets and latency.

Section 6: Blue Banana
Description 6: Detail the modeling and prediction technique for avatar mobility to preload necessary data and prevent transient failures.

Section 7: COPSS-based Gaming
Description 7: Outline the content-oriented publish/subscribe system for efficient multicasting in large multiplayer games.

Section 8: Dead-Reckoning
Description 8: Provide a detailed examination of Dead-Reckoning as a latency hiding, bandwidth saving, and power saving approach in networked games.

Section 9: COPSS-based Gaming
Description 9: Offer an in-depth analysis of COPSS-based Gaming, its implementation, and performance benefits over traditional server-based solutions.

Section 10: CONCLUSION
Description 10: Summarize the importance of efficient multicasting approaches in mobile cloud gaming, highlighting the discussed techniques and their impact on mobile gaming services.