Vegas Over Access Point: Making Room for Thin Client Game Systems in a Wireless Home

Abstract

Cloud-based entertainment is gaining momentum. With the cost of commodity hardware lowering by the day and the consumer market penetration of in-house digital entertainment systems, a new generation of interactive services has come into being. This new technological wave has launched new content producers and providers which are rapidly adapting to match the consumer demand. In this context, thin client or cloud based gaming is attracting much attention, shifting the computational burden to the cloud while the consumer enjoys a fat video feed accessed through its thin client via the shared wireless gateway. However, this model of interaction raises new challenges that demand for specific networking solutions aimed at addressing the heterogeneous flow coexistence problem at the home wireless gateway. We propose a solution to this problem by devising a TCP Vegas-like congestion control algorithm deployed on top of the home gateway. Our solution works out of the box with the standard protocols at server, router and client level, thereby making deployment straightforward. Experimental assessment with real traffic traces shows that our solution addresses the problem effectively.

A Survey of End-to-End Solutions for Reliable Low-Latency Communications in 5G Networks

“…The transmission control protocol (TCP) [125] is one of the most important protocols of the Internet; hence, it has been common to conduct research on the enhancement of the TCP. For instance, Petlund [79] presents TCP and SCTP modifications to satisfy the requirements of interactive and thinstream applications (low latency in small packet transmissions) such as games [126]; ER TCP Pert [80] is a solution that combines the delay-based TCP and early transmission to improve the performance in delivering real-time media by reducing the latency caused by retransmissions; TCP-ROME [81] is a transport-layer framework that allows establishing and coordinating multiple many-to-one TCP connections, increasing the reliability in streaming multimedia; and Massaro et al [82], [127] implemented an algorithm based on TCP Vegas [128] to improve the coexistence of TCP and UDP data with high throughput and low latency in heterogeneous flows (multimedia applications). Although the TCP does not meet the requirements of new technologies, it is not at all obsolete.…”

Are Remote Play Streaming Systems Doomed to Fail? A Network Perspective

“…However, dedicated game devices are generally expensive and users are restricted to play with time, place and compatibility limitations. An interesting solution that has gained popularity is represented by the remote play game streaming services allowing users to immediately play with a large selection of games, without the need of a specialized hardware, although at the cost of facing potential network issues [1]. This service allows users to enjoy gaming on a thin client, whereas, the computational burden is offloaded to a remote and more capable machine (a server) that collects the players' actions, elaborates the evolution of the game, renders the scene, and sends to the various players a video stream.…”

“…Indeed, the high resolution video streaming sent by the game server to the thin clients is a big difference in terms of network stress with respect to classic online games [1]. As research regarding the latter is generally focused on jitter and latency, with bandwidth neglected as an issue due to the very limited amount needed [4], [5], [6], we focus here mainly on bandwidth requirements showing how it becomes a worthy research topic when considering thin client based games.…”

Feasibility of Commodity WiFi for Operations Control in an Autonomous Production Site

“…To this end, ensuring an acceptable QoS level, different metrics extracted from the general traffic layout have been adopted e.g., use of the goodput metric as a measure of packet arrival rate during a certain period of time; load level indicating the usage of a medium on a given time frame; and available bandwidth measuring the rate which new flows can send traffic without impairing existing traffic in the network etc. Since its deployment, a lot of research effort has been devoted to tackle the various issues, addressing the problems at different layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack ranging from physical to the application layer [12], [13], [14] In the next section, we briefly present the scenario of interest consisting of an autonomous production site and mobile robots involved in the transportation of goods from/to different production areas. The mobile robots (AGVs) periodically and continuously transmit and receive data from health/operational data to infrastructure endpoints.…”