GECKO: Gamer experience-centric bitrate control algorithm for cloud gaming

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. Cloud gaming considered as the future of computer games enables users to play high-end games on resource-constrained heterogeneous devices. Games are rendered on remote clouds and delivered to users via the Internet in the form of video streaming, which can dramatically reduce the consumption of client-side resources. However, such service needs high bandwidth connections to make the game streaming smooth, which is already a major issue to hamper the prevalence of cloud gaming. In this paper, we propose a gamer experience-centric bitrate control algorithm called GECKO, to reduce the consumption of bandwidth resources for cloud gaming while only slightly impairing user quality-of-experience (QoE). Through measurement studies, we find that user QoE is mainly determined by the ROI (Region of Interest) size and QP offset. Hence, in order to save bandwidth consumption without severely impairing user QoE, we can lower the quality of the region outside of ROI. Our proposed GECKO algorithm is designed to adaptively tune the size of ROI and the quality of the outside region. We implement the GECKO algorithm on a real cloud gaming platform. The experiment results show that over 15.8% bandwidth can be saved compared with state-of-the-art approaches.