Inter-player Delay Optimization in Multiplayer Cloud Gaming

Novel cloud computing technology makes multiplayer cloud gaming a reality, where players play games that do not run on local devices, but on servers in the cloud. Nevertheless, the necessary communication between player's local device and cloud server increases the response delay of the gaming session. Besides the degrade of responsiveness, the inter-player delay, which is the difference of response delays perceived by players who are interacting with each other, can significantly affect the fairness of the multiplayer game. In this paper, we first introduce the Inter-player Delay Optimization (IDO) problem that aims at minimizing this inter-player delay, while preserving good-enough absolute response delay experienced by players. We further propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the IDO problem. The evaluation result of a comprehensive simulation using a large-scale real-world data trace shows that IDO can reduce up to about 30% of maximum inter-player delay among interacting players comparing with the other existing solution.