Analysis of Packet Aggregation on Cloud Games

Cloud gaming combines cloud technology with traditional software games. It is a highly interactive and delay-sensitive application, compared with other real-time services. We implement a packet aggregation mechanism on the traffic of First Person Shooters, a popular genre of the online game. Merging this flow of multiple packets into a single unit significantly reduces the number of transmissions per second, and improves the network performance. Reducing the relatively large protocol overhead per packet saves network bandwidth.Aggregation of packets is based on the timer threshold and the aggregation threshold. The aggregation scheme is evaluated on the basis of the average aggregation threshold and average aggregation delay. We show that (a) this does not affect the game's interactivity and consistency and (b) it increases the bandwidth usage efficiency.