Mobile Systems Design Lab Principal Investigator:
Professor Sujit Dey
University of California, San Diego

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Enabling Internet Multi-player Gaming on Mobile Devices

 

Overview

With the growing use of mobile devices for data services such as emails, Internet access, and mobile video/TV, recently there is tremendous interest and promise of growth in mobile video games. However, the gaming experience of current mobile video games is constrained in two ways: 1) unlike the richness and interactivity of Internet/PC games, current mobile video games are very light-weight, both in terms of graphics/features supported, as well as the content in the case of mobile versions of Internet games; and 2) unlike the multi-player capability, and the associated social networking, that made Internet/PC video gaming so popular, current mobile video games are primarily single player games. To achieve the popularity and growth of Internet PC games, mobile gaming will have to address and eliminate the above two handicaps, enabling mobile users, using mobile devices and wireless networks, to play the same popular Internet video games, and with similar gaming experiences.

There are two significant challenges to achieving the above goal. The first challenge pertains to the inherent constraint of a mobile device: computation ability. PC games usually run a game engine on each client device. This game engine needs a lot of computations and always requires sophisticated graphics processing, while the computational ability available on mobile device is very limited. The second challenge is the fundamental characteristics of mobile wireless networks: bandwidth fluctuations, latency and packet loss. This project is focused on developing a new mobile gaming solution to solve these problems, and also trying to implement a prototype with which people could play the popular PC games on their mobile devices.

Cloud Mobile Gaming approach

To address the problem of the limitation of the computation ability of mobile devices, we study the feasibility of a cloud server-based approach to enable rich, multi-player mobile video gaming: Cloud Mobile Gaming (CMG). This approach alleviates the need to install and execute gaming engines on a mobile device. Instead, the CMG server hosts the gaming engines. During a gaming session, the game control commands are sent from the mobile device to the CMG server, which executes the appropriate gaming engine, and compresses and streams the resulting video frames to the mobile devices in real time.
To enable the CMG approach with high user experience, we are currently addressing the following:
  • Develop a model to quantitatively measure the Mobile Gaming User Experience (MGUE) achieved using the CMG approach, considering the effects of wireless networks (latency, packet loss, jitter), mobile device resolutions, and CMG server capabilities on gaming user experience.
  • Develop a prototype for real-time measurement of MGUE that can be used in real networks.
  • Develop a set of adaptation algorithms for the CMG servers, such that the CMG servers can ensure high MGUE.
  • Study and address latency and scalability issues in CMG servers.


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People
 

 Shaoxuan Wang
 Graduate student

Sujit Dey
 PI


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