A Simple Architecture for Digital Games on Demand Using Low Performance Resources under a Cloud Computing Paradigm

Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly viable source of low cost computing power for developers and users in diverse areas. Services from the creation of presentations, spreadsheets and text processing, to picture and video editing, and more recently high performance scientific computing are some examples of systems currently available in the cloud. While these applications are typically executed in the form of batch jobs, responsiveness or timeliness is not usually an issue. Executing interactive applications, i.e. applications that require real time responsiveness in the cloud, however, is more challenging and still not so common in this environment.This work proposes and evaluates the feasibility of building a simple off-the-shelf architecture for an on demand gaming service. Our proposal consists on running an appropriate remote server in the cloud so that the client need only perform a few basic tasks, such as reading user input and displaying the resulting game screens. Consequently, even low-power computing systems, such as mobile devices or digital TV setup boxes, can have access to sophisticated graphic rich or complex games, since most of the processing is performed remotely.