To Frag Or To Be Fragged - An Empirical Assessment of Latency in Cloud Gaming
Key: LWH+13-1
Author: Ulrich Lampe, Qiong Wu, Ronny Hans, André Miede, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: May 2013
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: SciTe Press
Book title: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2013)
Keywords: cloud computing; cloud gaming; quality of service; latency; measurement
Abstract: With the emergence of cloud computing, diverse types of Information Technology services are increasingly provisioned through large data centers via the Internet. A relatively novel service category is cloud gaming, where video games are executed in the cloud and delivered to a client as audio/video stream. While cloud gaming substantially reduces the demand of computational power on the client side, thus enabling the use of thin clients, it may also affect the Quality of Service through the introduction of network latencies. In this work, we quantitatively examine this effect, using a self-developed measurement tool and a set of actual cloud gaming providers. For the two providers and three games in our experiment, we find absolute increases in latency between approximately 40 ms and 150 ms, or between 85% and 800% in relative terms.
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