A novel adaptive streaming approach for cloud-based mobile video games

Cloud gaming addresses multiple challenges related to the constraints on the resources of the players computer as well as the compatibility between the online game platform and the computers. The abundant CPU, memory and storage resources available in the cloud infrastructures enable new interaction schemes between the game and the player. For instance, through the development of new video coding strategies, the user experience can be improved, especially in the case where the access to the game is made through resource-impoverished mobile terminals. The objective of this paper is to introduce a new video coding strategy for cloud gaming. The proposed strategy takes into consideration the QoS parameters and the energy-consumption of the decoder. This allows balancing the graphic quality to the lifetime of the mobile terminal. Our strategy combines the use of the Kalman filter and the Adaptive Control Feedback Control Loop. This allows the implementation of interpolation and prediction mapping functionalities in order to compensate the loss of significant information from several frames. Through an experimental comparison of our scheme with respect to the most popular cloud gaming techniques, we show that we improve the trade-off between QoS parameters (i.e., processing delay, network bandwidth) and the lifetime of the mobile terminals.