A First Look at the Network Turbulence for Google Stadia Cloud-based Game Streaming

Abstract

While there have been network studies of traditional network games and streaming video, there is less work measuring cloud-based game streaming traffic and none on Google’s Stadia. This paper presents experiments that provide a first look – measuring Stadia game traffic for several games, analyzing the bitrates, packet sizes and inter-packet times, and comparing the results to other applications. Results indicate Stadia, unlike traditional network game systems, rapidly sends large packets downstream and small packets upstream, similar to but still significantly different than video and at much higher rates than previous cloud-based game systems or video.