Bringing mobile online games to clouds

Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) are characterized by intensive interactions between many simultaneous users and real-time demands on Quality of Service (QoS). Other examples of similar, real-time online interactive applications include various virtual environments, as well as multi-pupil e-learning and simulation-based training courses. A highly desirable enhancement for MMOG is the use of mobile devices for accessing the game application. However, the limited computing power of mobile devices is an obstacle for implementing computation-intensive parts of MMOG, in particular graphics processing, on mobile devices. This paper proposes a novel runtime system for mobile MMOG and other similar applications that moves computation-intensive tasks, including graphics processing, from the mobile devices to Cloud resources. We report experimental results of our runtime system using a realistic multi-player online game.