Rendering Adaptation to Address Communication and Computation Constraints in Cloud Mobile Gaming

A new Cloud Mobile Gaming (CMG) approach, where the responsibility of executing the gaming engines, including the most compute intensive tasks of graphic rendering, is put on cloud servers instead of the mobile devices, has the potential for enabling mobile users to play the same rich Internet games available to PC users. However, the mobile gaming user experience may be limited by the communication constraint imposed by available wireless networks and computation constraint imposed by the cost and availability of cloud servers. In this paper, we propose a rendering adaptation technique which can adapt the game rendering parameters to satisfy CMG communication and computation constraints, such that the overall mobile gaming user experience is maximized. Experiments conducted on a commercial UMTS network demonstrate that the proposed rendering adaptation techniques can make the CMG approach feasible: ensuring protection against wireless network conditions, and ensuring server computation scalability, thereby ensuring acceptable mobile gaming user experience.