Where Did My Battery Go? Quantifying the Energy Consumption of Cloud Gaming

With the growing maturity of the cloud computing paradigm, clouds are increasingly used for the delivery of complex multimedia services, rather than just simple infrastructure offers. A popular example of such services is cloud gaming, where video games are executed in the cloud and delivered to a (mobile) client via the Internet. While cloud gaming shifts the computationally complex and energetically expensive task of rendering the game content from the client to a server, it also requires the constant, energy-demanding use of wireless interfaces. In this work, we examine this trade-off based on a custom-designed mobile cloud gaming system called MCGS.KOM. Our experiments, which involve different mobile phones, varying game complexities, and various streaming quality levels, indicate that cloud gaming may facilitate substantial energy saving between 12% and 38% on the mobile device if WLAN is used as network connection type.