Using Mobile Cloud Computing for Real-Time Online Applications

We consider a challenging class of highly interactive virtual environments, also known as Real-Time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). Popular examples of ROIA include multi-player online computer games, e-learning and training applications based on real-time simulations, among others. An emerging enhancement for ROIA is the use of mobile devices for accessing the application (mobile ROIA). However, the limited computing power of mobile devices is an obstacle for implementing computation-intensive parts of ROIA, in particular graphics processing, on mobile devices. This paper proposes a runtime system for mobile ROIA that moves computation-intensive tasks, including graphics processing, from the mobile devices to Cloud resources. We report experimental results of our runtime system using a multi-player online game with real-world characteristics.