Measuring and Estimating Key Quality Indicators in Cloud Gaming services

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to measure and predict key quality indicators of Cloud Gaming services using machine learning, enabling telecom operators to improve service delivery without direct device access.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for estimating Cloud Gaming quality metrics and evaluates machine learning methods for predicting user experience from network data.

Findings

Machine learning accurately predicts key quality indicators.

Network-based metrics can estimate user experience without device access.

Framework supports real-time monitoring and optimization of Cloud Gaming.

Abstract

User equipment is one of the main bottlenecks facing the gaming industry nowadays. The extremely realistic games which are currently available trigger high computational requirements of the user devices to run games. As a consequence, the game industry has proposed the concept of Cloud Gaming, a paradigm that improves gaming experience in reduced hardware devices. To this end, games are hosted on remote servers, relegating users' devices to play only the role of a peripheral for interacting with the game. However, this paradigm overloads the communication links connecting the users with the cloud. Therefore, service experience becomes highly dependent on network connectivity. To overcome this, Cloud Gaming will be boosted by the promised performance of 5G and future 6G networks, together with the flexibility provided by mobility in multi-RAT scenarios, such as WiFi. In this scope, the present work proposes a framework for measuring and estimating the main E2E metrics of the Cloud Gaming service, namely KQIs. In addition, different machine learning techniques are assessed for predicting KQIs related to Cloud Gaming user's experience. To this end, the main key quality indicators (KQIs) of the service such as input lag, freeze percent or perceived video frame rate are collected in a real environment. Based on these, results show that machine learning techniques provide a good estimation of these indicators solely from network-based metrics. This is considered a valuable asset to guide the delivery of Cloud Gaming services through cellular communications networks even without access to the user's device, as it is expected for telecom operators.