Modeling Gaming QoE: Towards the Impact of Frame Rate and Bit Rate on Cloud Gaming

Recent advances of streaming services and the upcoming new generation of mobile networks, 5G, offering low end-to-end delay as well as high bandwidths, promise a bright future for cloud gaming applications. Cloud gaming, in the contrary to traditional gaming services, suffers not only from system factors on the client, but is also affected significantly by the network, server specification and encoding parameters. In this paper, we present the results of a subjective experiment aiming to investigate the impact of two influencing factors, frame rate and bit rate, on the gaming Quality of Experience. The results reveal that a trade-off between an acceptable video quality and interaction quality exists. In case of very low bit rates, lowering the frame rate can improve the video quality while at some point, jerkiness becomes visible which affects the video quality negatively and the control over the game will be strongly reduced. Furthermore, even though in the gaming community a frame rate of 60 fps is desired, no significant difference for quality ratings, as well as performance ratings, was found between 60 fps and 25 fps. Therefore, it would be highly valuable for service providers to find an ideal strategy for this issue. In addition, we investigate the impact of video encoding on gaming experience dimensions. Finally, a first attempt to model the impact of two influencing factors on overall quality will be presented.