Gaming at the Edge: A Weighted Congestion Game Approach for Latency-Sensitive Scheduling

The rapidly evolving technology of edge computing shows great potential in revolutionizing the market of cloud gaming. Edge computing can significantly lower the latency for better gaming experiences by performing computation at the proximity of game players. However, the acceleration of latency-sensitive cloud gaming services at the edge is challenging due to the heterogeneity of edge servers, different requirements among game players, and so on. In this paper, we propose an efficient latency-sensitive scheduling algorithm called EGSA to satisfy latency constraints for cloud gaming services at the edge. We first formulate the problem as a weighted congestion game, which takes a number of key factors (e.g., game genres, user strategies, latency constraint and device heterogeneity) into account. Based on the weighted congestion game model, we further design an efficient latency-sensitive scheduling algorithm, which can approximate the pure Nash equilibrium under Shapley cost-sharing method. We also perform theoretic analysis to prove that our proposed algorithm converges in polynomial steps. Finally, we conduct a set of experiments and the results show that our algorithm outperforms alternative strategies with up to 46% performance improvement.