Lag compensation for first-person shooter games in cloud gaming

Abstract

Cloud gaming is an emerging technology that combines cloud computing with computer games. Compared to traditional gaming, its core advantages include ease of development/deployment for developers, and lower technology costs for users given the potential to play on thin client devices. In this chapter, we firstly describe the approach, and then focus on the impact of latency, known as lag, on Quality of Experience, for so-called First Person Shooter games. We outline our approach to lag compensation whereby we equalize within reason the up and downlink delays in real-time for all players. We describe the testbed in detail, the open source Gaming Anywhere platform, the use of NTP to synchronise time, the network emulator and the role of the centralized log server. We then present results that firstly validate the mechanism and also use small scale and preliminary subjective tests to assess and prove its performance. We conclude the chapter by outlining ongoing and future work.