Keynote talk II - Video game as a service: Cloud computing enabled video gaming anywhere on any device

Summary form only given. There is a growing demand by consumers to access their digital entertainments, which are increasingly cloud-based, whenever and wherever they have access to networks of diverse characteristics, and using whatever devices they have in their hands. To address this diversity, we have embarked on a project is to develop design methodologies and enabling technologies to support “play anywhere on any device, pause and resume on any device” capabilities in next-generation cloud-based video games. In particular, scalable and ubiquitous computing resources in the cloud can enable sophisticated video games to be played on mobile devices that have limited processing and storage capacities. In this talk, we start with an overview of the general characteristics of mobile cloud computing and related research issues. We propose a cloud-based video game system with cooperative video sharing over a secondary ad hoc wireless network. Experimental results show that the expected server transmission rate can be significantly reduced compared to the conventional video encoding schemes for cloud games. We conclude with a discussion on our ongoing research to develop a cognitive framework that will provide “video game as a service” to players using a variety of devices to access computer games in the cloud over different wireless and wireline networks with diverse quality of service characteristics.