Cloud gaming in education: Evaluation of multiple game streams in a shared WLAN

Abstract

This paper presents a platform for using digital games in an educational scenario - teaching in classrooms. The platform is based on the cloud gaming concept, whereby game content is delivered from a server to a client as a video stream, and game controls are sent from the client to the server. We shortly present the architecture of the solution and focus on the evaluation of the network performance inside schools. We study user perceived cloud gaming performance under the impact of multiple cloud gaming streams in a shared WLAN. An empirical user study was performed using the GamingAnywhere platform wherein participants were asked to report on perceived degradations of game play quality imposed by incrementally adding additional artificially generated cloud gaming streams to the same network. Results show that degradations are perceived (in the form of video jitter and higher latency) by most participants when four or more cloud gaming traffic flows share the same wireless access point.