TailClip: Mitigating Tail Latency in Cloud Gaming via Smart Video Frame Generation

Latency is one of the most significant issues in cloud gaming, among which tail latency, mainly attributed to dynamic network environments (i.e., transmission) and limited device computing capacity (e.g., decoding), has attracted increasing attention. To mitigate the tail latency, different from existing researches considering resource adaptation such as bitrate adaptation, we propose TailClip, whose novel idea is to enable video frame generation at the client if the tail latency is about to happen. TailClip consists of two innovative components: a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) driven tail latency trigger that jointly decides a series of subsequent frame generation regarding multidimensional features of historical tail latency; a lightweight frame generation model derived by adaptive pruning in terms of device computing capacity at runtime. Extensive evaluations indicate the superior performance of TailClip. For example, it can remove the high-latency frames (i.e., over 100 ms) by 77% with an acceptable video quality (i.e., 0.45 dB reduction on average).