UC San Diego

This dissertation studies a new cloud server based approach for mobile gaming, termed Cloud Mobile Gaming (CMG), that enables 3D, multiplayer, Internet video games on mobile phones -- the kinds of games that today require a powerful PC tethered to the Internet. We flipped the traditional client-server architecture for PC-based Internet games on its head and looked to cloud computing, instead of putting most of the storage and computational burden of the games on the mobile device. Though promising, the new CMG approach will impose other challenges, namely to ensure high mobile gaming user experience (as two-way gaming data including video will need to be transmitted through wireless networks in real time), and ensure scalability in terms of cloud servers and network bandwidth, so as to ensure economic viability of the approach. In our work, we have developed key new technologies to address these challenges. We first developed and validated a Mobile Gaming User Experience model, which can quantitatively measure user perceived mobile gaming experience. Next, we develop an adaptive rendering technique which can simultaneously vary the richness and complexity of graphic rendering to adapt the communication and computing needs of each CMG session in responding to the dynamic conditions of the wireless networks and cloud server. Finally, we present a mobile cloud scheduling approach which can allocate resources to meet user experience requirements while maximizing the number of users which can be scheduled concurrently and minimizing cloud cost. The experimental results presented demonstrate that our proposed adaptive rendering technique and the mobile cloud scheduling approach can efficiently address the challenges imposed by the wireless network and cloud server, ensuring the user perceived gaming quality as well as the scalability for the CMG approach. We believe the techniques proposed in this work will not only enable rich Internet cloud gaming, but also other rich mobile multimedia applications using the cloud