Power-aware analysis of H.264/AVC encoding parameters for cloud gaming

Due to its high coding efficiency, H.264/AVC is commonly used in cloud gaming. This compression standard is computationally intensive, but its complexity can be controlled using its encoder configuration parameters. Finding the proper encoding configuration is a challenge for a cloud gaming platform with a large number of heterogeneous clients. In this paper, we have determined a subset of most important encoding parameters that have the most significant effect on both quality and complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder. Using this subset one can design a low complexity, yet efficient, Distortion-Complexity model to control and reduce power consumption and operational cost of cloud gaming providers by efficiently tuning their H.264/AVC encoding parameters. The proposed subset has reduced the number of combinations of encoding parameters to %0.05 of all possible parameter settings.