Minimizing Play Request Rejection through Workload Splitting in Edge-Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming abstracts the concept of traditional gaming and places the gaming activities on remote rendering servers (RSes). Although this allows heterogeneous devices to gain access to multiple game titles, latency issue is always unavoidable. Each game input must go through a complete round trip between the player's device and the cloud gaming server. Hence, cloud games are not as responsive as traditional computer games where the game logic runs locally. Moreover, in order to have an acceptable level of game playability, the latency level must be within a certain threshold. This also prevents some players who are located in remote regions from playing the game due to high latency. Therefore, in this paper, we employ edge servers in order to reach those players by activating lower capability RSes which are more geographically distributed. Furthermore, we also allow workload splitting of foreground and background rendering between edge and cloud RSes to ease the burden of each individual RS with a trade-off between cost and latency constraints. From our experiments, our architecture and allocation scheme results in reduction of play request rejections for up to 28% compared to traditional cloud gaming approach.