Cloud gaming onward: research opportunities and outlook

Cloud gaming has become increasingly more popular in the academia and the industry, evident by the large numbers of related research papers and startup companies. Some public cloud gaming services have attracted hundreds of thousands subscribers, demonstrating the initial success of cloud gaming services. Pushing the cloud gaming services forward, however, faces various challenges, which open up many research opportunities. In this paper, we share our views on the future cloud gaming research, and point out several research problems spanning over a wide spectrum of different directions: including distributed systems, video codecs, virtualization, human-computer interaction, quality of experience, resource allocation, and dynamic adaptation. Solving these research problems will allow service providers to offer high-quality cloud gaming services yet remain profitable, which in turn results in even more successful cloud gaming eco-environment. In addition, we believe there will be many more novel ideas to capitalize the abundant and elastic cloud resources for better gaming experience, and we will see these ideas and associated challenges in the years to come.