A Survey of Bandwidth and Latency Enhancement Approaches for Mobile Cloud Game Multicasting

Abstract: Among mobile cloud applications, mobile cloud gaming has gained a significant popularity in the recent years. In mobile cloud games, textures, game objects, and game events are typically streamed from a server to the mobile client. One of the challenges in cloud mobile gaming is how to efficiently multicast gaming contents and updates in Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs). This report surveys the state of art techniques introduced for game synchronization and multicasting mechanisms to decrease latency and bandwidth consumption, and discuss several schemes that have been proposed in this area that can be applied to any networked gaming context. From our point of view, gaming applications demand high interactivity. Therefore, concentrating on gaming applications will eventually cover a wide range of applications without violating the limited scope of this survey.