Cloud gaming, i.e., real-time game playing via thin clients, relieves players from the need to constantly upgrade their computers and deal with compatibility issues when playing games. As a result, cloud gaming is generating a great deal of interest among entrepreneurs and the public. However, given the large design space, it is not yet known which platforms deliver the best quality of service and which design elements constitute a good cloud gaming system. This study is motivated by the question: How good is the real-timeliness of current cloud gaming systems? To address the question, we analyze the response latency of two cloud gaming platforms, namely, OnLive and StreamMyGame. Our results show that the streaming latency of OnLive is reasonable for real-time cloud gaming, while that of StreamMyGame is almost twice the former when the StreamMyGame server is provisioned using an Intel Core i7-920 PC. We believe that our measurement approach can be generally applied to PC-based cloud gaming platforms, and that it will further the understanding of such systems and lead to improvements.

Abstract-The thin-client model is considered a perfect fit for online gaming. As modern games normally require tremendous computing and rendering power at the game client, deploying games with such models can transfer the burden of hardware upgrades from players to game operators. As a result, there are a variety of solutions proposed for thin-client gaming today. However, little is known about the performance of such thinclient systems in different scenarios, and there is no systematic means yet to conduct such analysis.In this paper, we propose a methodology for quantifying the performance of thin-clients on gaming, even for thin-clients which are close-sourced. Taking a classic game, Ms. Pac-Man, and three popular thin-clients, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and UltraVNC, as examples, we perform a demonstration study and determine that 1) display frame rate and frame distortion are both critical to gaming; and 2) different thin-client implementations may have very different levels of robustness against network impairments. Generally, LogMeIn performs best when network conditions are reasonably good, while TeamViewer and UltraVNC are the better choices under certain network conditions.

Abstract-Although online games have been an important Internet activity today, players inevitably suffer from lag from time to time due to the Internet's non-QoS-guaranteed architecture. Here by lag we refer to the phenomena when a game fails to respond to user commands or update the screen in a timely fashion due to long system processing or network delays. Currently, little is known about how game players feel about lag and how they react when encountering lag during game play.In this paper, we present an Internet survey that is designed to understand the following questions: 1) How do players perceive lag, 2) what do players think of the causes of lag, and 3) how do players react to lag. Our results show that game players often struggle with lag, because they are unable to identify the root cause. Therefore, they have to try any combination of possible solutions found on the Internet, blame game companies, or learn to cope. These findings manifest a strong demand for an automatic diagnostic tool that can identify the root cause of lag for gamers.

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Network mobility is proposed to let a mobile network change its point of attachment and still keep all nodes attached to the mobile network globally reachable. However, due to finite bandwidth, limited signaling coverage and frequent link failure, a mobile network needs multihoming to access the Internet simultaneously on the perspective of performance and reliability. In this paper, we extends our previous work, i.e., SIP-based Network Mobility (SIP-NEMO), to support multihoming. A mobile network is considered to possess more than one egress gateway. The proposed multihomed SIP-NEMO provides dynamic synchronization among different egress gateways. Once an egress gateway joins or leaves the mobile network, the multihomed SIP-NEMO can establish or switch sessions on another alternative egress gateway. According to the simulation results, the proposed multihomed SIP-NEMO can achieve route optimization for data transmission.