A Survey of Bandwidth and Latency Enhancement Approaches for Mobile Cloud Game Multicasting

TL;DR

This survey reviews techniques for reducing bandwidth and latency in mobile cloud gaming multicast systems, focusing on synchronization and multicasting methods to enhance interactivity in multiplayer online games.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current state-of-the-art approaches for game synchronization and multicasting to improve performance in mobile cloud gaming.

Findings

Various schemes can effectively reduce latency and bandwidth consumption.

Multicasting techniques are adaptable to different networked gaming scenarios.

High interactivity demands influence the choice of optimization methods.

Abstract

Among mobile cloud applications, mobile cloud gaming has gained a significant popularity in the recent years. In mobile cloud games, textures, game objects, and game events are typically streamed from a server to the mobile client. One of the challenges in cloud mobile gaming is how to efficiently multicast gaming contents and updates in Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs). This report surveys the state of art techniques introduced for game synchronization and multicasting mechanisms to decrease latency and bandwidth consumption, and discuss several schemes that have been proposed in this area that can be applied to any networked gaming context. From our point of view, gaming applications demand high interactivity. Therefore, concentrating on gaming applications will eventually cover a wide range of applications without violating the limited scope of this survey.