A Simple Architecture for Digital Games on Demand Using Low Performance Resources under a Cloud Computing Paradigm

Cloud computing is becoming an increasinglyviable source of low cost computing power for developers andusers in diverse areas. Services from the creation ofpresentations, spreadsheets and text processing, to picture andvideo editing, and more recently high performance scientificcomputing are some examples of systems currently available inthe cloud. While these applications are typically executed in theform of batch jobs, responsiveness or timeliness is not usuallyan issue. Executing interactive applications, i.e. applicationsthat require real time responsiveness in the cloud, however, ismore challenging and still not so common in this environment.This work proposes and evaluates the feasibility of building asimple off-the-shelf architecture for an on demand gamingservice. Our proposal consists on running an appropriateremote server in the cloud so that the client need only performa few basic tasks, such as reading user input and displaying theresulting game screens. Consequently, even low-powercomputing systems, such as mobile devices or digital TV setupboxes, can have access to sophisticated graphic rich or complexgames, since most of the processing is performed remotely.