End-to-end Characterization of Game Streaming Applications on Mobile Platforms

With the advent of 5G, hosting high-quality game streaming applications on mobile devices has become a reality. To our knowledge, no prior study systematically investigates the < QoS, Energy > tuple on the end-to-end game streaming pipeline across the cloud, network, and edge devices to understand the individual contributions of the different pipeline stages. In this paper, we present a comprehensive performance and power analysis of the entire game streaming pipeline through extensive measurements with a high-end workstation mimicking the cloud end, an open-source platform (Moonlight-GameStreaming) emulating the edge device/mobile platform, and two network settings (WiFi and 5G). Our study shows that the rendering stage and the encoding stage at the cloud end are the bottlenecks for 4K streaming. While 5G is certainly more suitable for supporting enhanced video quality with 4K streaming, it is more expensive in terms of power consumption compared to WiFi. Further, the network interface and the decoder units in mobile devices need more energy-efficient design to support high quality games at a lower cost. These observations should help in designing more cost-effective future cloud gaming platforms.