iCloudAccess: Cost-Effective Streaming of Video Games From the Cloud With Low Latency

As a new paradigm, cloud gaming allows users to play high-end video games instantly without downloading or installing the original game software. In this paper, we first conduct a series of well-designed active and passive measurements on a large-scale cloud gaming platform and identify the significant diversity in the queueing delay and response delay among users. We note that the latency problem largely results from user-specified request routing and inelastic server provisioning. To address latency problem of the cloud gaming platform, we further propose an online control algorithm called iCloudAccess to perform intelligent request dispatching and server provisioning. Our main objective is to cut down the provisioning cost of cloud gaming service providers while still ensuring the user quality-of-experience requirements. We formulate the problem as a constrained stochastic optimization problem and apply the Lyapunov optimization theory to derive the online control algorithm with provable upper bounds. We also conduct extensive trace-driven simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm, and our results show that our proposed algorithm achieves significant gain over other alternative approaches.