Ad-Hoc Cloudlet Based Cooperative Cloud Gaming

As the game industry matures, processing complex game logics in a timely manner is no longer an insurmountable problem. However, current cloud-based mobile gaming solutions are limited by their relatively high requirements on Internet resources. Also, they typically do not consider the geographical locations of nearby mobile users and thus ignore the potential cooperation among them. Therefore, inspired by existing cloud computing techniques, we propose an ad hoc mobile-cloudlet-cloud based approach to implement cooperative gaming architecture. In this paper, two modules of the architecture are introduced: 1) progressive game resources download, by which mobile users can adaptively download gaming resources from cloud servers or nearby mobile users, 2) ad-hoc mobile based cooperative task allocation, by which gaming components can be executed dynamically on local devices, nearby devices, stationary cloudlet(s), or cloud servers. The mechanisms of both modules are formulated as optimization problems and algorithms are proposed to solve them. Simulations results based on real mobility traces show that our system's performance depends highly on the ad-hoc network environment. Our scheme has lower system resource usage while utilizing resources of nearby devices, compared to the cloud-based gaming architecture; and performs better with short on-device task duration compared to code-offloading based architecture.