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With the advent of 5G, supporting high-quality game streaming applications on edge devices has become a reality. This is evidenced by a recent surge in cloud gaming applications on mobile devices. In contrast to video streaming applications, interactive games require much more compute power for supporting improved rendering (such as 4K streaming) with the stipulated frames-per second (FPS) constraints. This in turn consumes more battery power in a power-constrained mobile device. Thus, the state-of-the-art gaming applications suffer from lower video quality (QoS) and/or energy efficiency. While there has been a plethora of recent works on optimizing game streaming applications, to our knowledge, there is no study that systematically investigates the design pairs on the end-to-end game streaming pipeline across the cloud, network, and edge devices to understand the individual contributions of the different stages of the pipeline for improving the overall QoS and energy efficiency. In this context, this paper presents a comprehensive performance and power analysis of the entire game streaming pipeline consisting of the server/cloud side, network, and edge. Through extensive measurements with a high-end workstation mimicking the cloud end, an open-source platform (Moonlight-GameStreaming) emulating the edge device/mobile platform, and two network settings (WiFi and 5G) we conduct a detailed measurement-based study with seven representative games with different characteristics. We characterize the performance in terms of frame latency, QoS, bitrate, and energy consumption for different stages of the gaming pipeline. Our study shows that the rendering stage and the encoding stage at the cloud end are the bottlenecks to support 4K streaming. While 5G is certainly more suitable for supporting enhanced video quality with 4K streaming, it is more expensive in terms of power consumption compared to WiFi. Further, fluctuations in 5G network quality can lead to huge frame drops thus affecting QoS, which needs to be addressed by a coordinated design between the edge device and the server. Finally, the network interface and the decoder units in a mobile platform need more energy-efficient design to support high quality games at a lower cost. These observations should help in designing more cost-effective future cloud gaming platforms.
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Impact of Device Performance on Mobile Internet QoE
A large fraction of users in developing regions use relatively inexpensive, low-end smartphones. However, the impact of device capabilities on the performance of mobile Internet applications has not been explored. To bridge this gap, we study the QoE of three popular applications -- Web browsing, video streaming, and video telephony -- for different device parameters. Our results demonstrate that the performance of Web browsing is much more sensitive to low-end hardware than that of video applications, especially video streaming. This is because the video applications exploit specialized coprocessors/accelerators and thread-level parallelism on multi-core mobile devices. Even low-end devices are equipped with needed coprocessors and multiple cores. In contrast, Web browsing is largely influenced by clock frequency, but it uses no more than two cores. This makes the performance of Web browsing more vulnerable on low-end smartphones. Based on the lessons learned from studying video applications, we explore offloading Web computation to a coprocessor. Specifically, we explore the offloading of regular expression computation to a DSP coprocessor and show an improvement of 18% in page load time while saving energy by a factor of four.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718014
- PAR ID:
- 10095672
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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