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Overview
GamingAnywhere is an open-source clouding gaming platform. In addition to its openness,
we design GamingAnywhere for high extensibility, portability, and reconfigurability.
GamingAnywhere currently supports Windows and Linux, and can be ported to other OS's
including OS X and Android. Table 1 gives the latest supported OS's and versions. Our
performance study demonstrates that GamingAnywhere achieves high responsiveness and
video quality yet imposes low network traffic. The value of GamingAnywhere, however, is
from its openness: researchers, service providers, and gamers may customize
GamingAnywhere to meet their needs. This is not possible in other closed and proprietary
cloud gaming platforms.
Table 1: The supported platforms
Windows

Linux

Mac OS X

Android

Server

Windows 7+

Supported

Supported

--

Client

Windows XP+

Supported

Supported

4.1+

Motivation
Computer games have become very popular, e.g., gamers spent 24.75 billion USD on
computer games, hardware, and accessories in 20115 Traditionally, computer games are
delivered either in boxes or via Internet downloads. Gamers have to install the computer
games on physical machines to play them. The installation process becomes extremely
tedious because the games are too complicated and the computer hardware and system
software are very fragmented. Take Blizzard's Starcraft II as example, it may take more
than an hour to install it on an i5 PC, and another hour to apply the online patches.
Furthermore, gamers may find their computers are not powerful enough to enable all the

visual effects yet achieve high frame rates. Hence, gamers have to repeatedly upgrade their
computers so as to play the latest computer games.
Cloud gaming is a better way to deliver high-quality gaming experience and opens new
business opportunity8. In a cloud gaming system, computer games run on powerful cloud
servers, while gamers interact with the games via networked thin clients. The thin clients
are light-weight and can be ported to resource-constrained platforms, such as mobile
devices and TV set-top boxes. With cloud gaming, gamers can play the latest computer
gamers anywhere and anytime, while the game developers can optimize their games for a
specific PC configuration. The huge potential of cloud gaming has been recognized by the
game industry: (i) a market report predicts that cloud gaming market will increase 9 times
between 2011 and 20173 and (ii) several cloud gaming startups were recently acquired by
leading game developers1,4.
Although cloud gaming is a promising direction for the game industry, achieving good user
experience without excessive hardware investment is a tough problem. This is because
gamers are hard to please, as they concurrently demand for high responsiveness and high
video quality, but do not want to pay too much. Therefore, service providers have to not
only design the systems to meet the gamers' needs but also take error resiliency, scalability,
and resource allocation into considerations. This renders the design and implementation of
cloud gaming systems extremely challenging. Indeed, while real-time video streaming
seems to be a mature technology at first glance, cloud gaming systems have to execute
games, handle user inputs, and perform rendering, capturing, encoding, packetizing,
transmitting, decoding, and displaying in real-time, and thus are much more difficult to
optimize.
Fortunately, many systems researchers have new ideas to improve cloud gaming experience
for gamers and reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) for
service providers. However, all existing cloud gaming platforms2,6,9 are closed and
proprietary, which prevent the researchers from testing their ideas on real cloud gaming
systems. Therefore, the new ideas were either only tested using simulators/emulators, or,
worse, never evaluated and published. Hence, very few new ideas on cloud gaming (in
specific) or highly-interactive distributed systems (more general) have been transferred to
the industry. To better bridge the multimedia research community and the game/software
industry, we present GamingAnywhere, the first open source cloud gaming testbed in this
paper. While in its infancy, we hope GamingAnywhere cloud gather enough attentions, and
quickly grow into a community with critical mass, just like Openflow7, which shares the
same motivation with GamingAnywhere in a different research area.

Figure 1: The deployment scenario of GamingAnywhere.

System Deployment
The deployment scenario of GamingAnywhere is shown in Figure 1. A user first logs into the
system via a portal server, which provides a list of available games to the user. The user
then selects a preferred game and requests to play the game. Upon receipt of the request,
the portal server finds an available game server, launches the selected game on the server,
and returns the game server's URL to the user. Finally, the user connects to the game server
and starts to play. There is not too much to discuss for the portal server, which is just like
most Web-based services and provides only a simple login and game selection user
interface. If login and game selection requests are sent from a customized client, it does not
even need a user interface. Actions can be sent as REST-like requests via standard HTTP or
HTTPS protocols.

Design Philosophy
GamingAnywhere aims to provide an open platform for researchers to develop and study
real-time multimedia streaming applications in the cloud. The design objectives of
GamingAnywhere include:
1.

Extensibility: GamingAnywhere adopts a modularized design. Both platformdependent components such as audio and video capturing and platform-independent
components such as codecs and network protocols can be easily modified or replaced.
Developers should be able to follow the programming interfaces of modules in
GamingAnywhere to extend the capabilities of the system. It is not limited only to

games, and any real-time multimedia streaming application such as live casting can be
done using the same system architecture.
2.

Portability: In addition to desktops, mobile devices are now becoming one of the
most potential clients of cloud services as wireless networks are getting increasingly
more popular. For this reason, we maintain the principle of portability when designing
and implementing GamingAnywhere. Currently the server supports Windows and
Linux, while the client supports Windows, Linux, and OS X. New platforms can be
easily included by replacing platform-dependent components in GamingAnywhere.
Besides the easily replaceable modules, the external components leveraged by
GamingAnywhere are highly portable as well. This also makes GamingAnywhere easier
to be ported to mobile devices.

3.

Configurability: A system researcher may conduct experiments for real-time

multimedia streaming applications with diverse system parameters. A large number of
built-in audio and video codecs are supported by GamingAnywhere. In addition,
GamingAnywhere exports all available configurations to users so that it is possible to
try out the best combinations of parameters by simply editing a text-based
configuration file and fitting the system into a customized usage scenario.

4.

Openness: GamingAnywhere is publicly available at this website. Use of

GamingAnywhere in academic research is free of charge but researchers and
developers should follow the license terms claimed in the binary and source packages.

[1] Cloud gaming adoption is accelerating . . . and fast!

[2] Onlive web page.
[3] Distribution and monetization strategies to increase revenues from cloud gaming.
[4] Electronic Arts buys online gaming studio ESN, the developers behind battlefields
battlelog online social network.
[5] Entertainment Software Associationindustry facts.
[6] Gaikai web page.
[7] N. McKeown, T. Anderson, H. Balakrishnan, G. Parulkar, L. Peterson, J. Rexford, S.
Shenker, and J. Turner. Openflow: enabling innovation in campus networks. SIGCOMM
Comput. Commun. Rev., 38(2):6974, Mar. 2008.
[8] P. Ross. Cloud computings killer app: Gaming. IEEE Spectrum, 46(3):14, 2009.
[9] StreamMyGame web page.

GamingAnywhere.org 2013. Webmaster: Kuan-Ta Chen | Template design by skyka.

Cloud Gaming Adoption is Acceleratingand Fast!

By Stephane Kurower / 9 July 2012 / 304 comments
Cloud Gaming is still a stranger to the mass-market. However, this could all change with the recent Sony
acquisition of Gaikai, an open cloud gaming platform provider. Major brands are starting to take notice
and its changing the way consumers interact with and obtain content.
But first of all, what is Cloud Gaming?
Incredible graphics on weak hardware to put it bluntly. Its a new type of online gaming that allows you to
stream high-end video games, on-demand straight to your computer without owning or buying any expensive
hardware. A thin client, like a simple phone or a tablet is enough to play a game that would normally have to
be installed on a very expensive PC.
Could this be the death of 1st and 2nd generation consoles? Who knows?

I want to play!
You can, its easy. Well, so long as you have broadband access its easy and painless. Gamers can benefit from
the new entertainment channel through an app on a smart phone or tablet, online via a computer and even by
using a TV. Subscription services are available (with a monthly fee) for access to a range of PC video games to
play at will. Alternatively, a license can be bought per game, depending on the provider.

How does it work?

For anyone connected to the technology or IT industry, cloud computing is nothing new and the concept is the
same. Where cloud gaming gets interesting, however, is when we take a look at the dynamics and technicality
of how it actually works during play.
When a request or action is sent from the thin client, the request is transmitted directly over the wire to a
dedicated data center (where the game is hosted from) where actions are recorded and sent back from the
server with a response to the request. Even the graphics, in fact, are also sent from the server. So the end result
means that the user benefits from a high-resolution video streamed back to a smaller and less powerful device.
Think Call of Duty on your android tablet.
Cloud gaming is of particular interest to hard-core gamers who want (or need in some instances), the ability to
play a game and pick up wherever they left off, wherever they. All they need is a decent broadband speed,
reliable network and a thin client.
The concept seems hard to believe, even in this digital era. But, the fastest way to get your head around it is to
try Onlive for yourself. Onlive provides access to 100s of high-end video games instantly on your PC, Mac,

TV, or mobile device. In less than five minutes youll be in neo-noir, shoot-em-up comic panels, answering to
the name of Max Payne. All this from your vintage PC.

Major brands on the starting blocks

The research behind cloud gaming started about 10 years ago, when G-Cluster founders created a cloud
gaming demo at the E3 in 2001! Although it was still only the beginning, the major brands were there, on the
starting blocks.
Names like Samsung, LG and Sony that make the hardware are looking to integrate one of the top 5 (or so)
cloud gaming provider solutions into their next Smart TV. The Set-top-boxes are also cloud gamers best
friends; Vizio (US), Singtel (Singapore), Hot (Israel), Portugal Telecom, Bouygues Telecom (France), SFR
(France) and Free (France).
One year ago, however, it was still quite difficult to see a clear trend. Now, the lines are moving and although
the video games market in itself is worth over $52 billion, cloud gaming is already at $80-90 million and is
expected to reach at least $400 million by 2014 (source: Strategy Analytics). I think were being slightly
pessimistic when we think about the potential of this technology and how perfect this solution is during the
recession with its advantageous business model for the consumer.
Geniuses behind this technology
When we take a closer look at how this works, we find ourselves wondering who manages, creates and
provides this type of company. We can only be impressed. For example, Onlive founder, Steve Perlman, was
the creator of the Quicktime Codec and WebTV. Or take Gaikai, created by the video games veteran David
Perry, a star of the late 90s video games like Earthworm Jim. Lastly, Playcast, where one of the founders was
part of the MPEG codec creation team.

Soon to be resolved, little flaws

With most young technology and anything in beta phase, there will always be flaws and bugs to slow down
adoption by the mass-market and preventing hard-core gamers to be seduced by this technology.
Take for example latency, this is a major issue. Playing a hosted game will come with its problems. From the
moment you press the shoot key and the actual time where your character in the game has actually shot and
killed your enemy, there will be a slight delay. But honestly, although this isnt acceptable for a competition
gamer, this is playable for 90% of other gamers. And given that some solutions have already been found thanks
to NVIDIA Grid Cloud, we just to need to manage and mitigate the issues around low-latency which means us
keeping updated with the next evolutions.

But what are the little issues in comparison to the benefits?

For the mass-market, a way to play to more games and spend far less money than ever. For the game editors,
this is a new lab to explore some economic models like game renting or game subscriptions without the hassle
and costs of physical distribution.

For the hosting industry, after the MMO blessing this could become an even bigger blessing and may
dramatically increase the needs in high-end servers and data centers.
And for the hardware manufacturer, NVIDIA has launched their GeForce Grid Cloud cramming 84 GPUs per
rack, reducing half the latency.
Knowing that an Xbox 360 is running at 240 billion floating point operations/sec and PC, 3 trillion. And in
addition, the forthcoming Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games will demand so much CPU and GPU power that it
will put cloud gaming even more so in the spotlight.
And something to look forward to Sonys acquisition of Gaikai, the big starter of everything and anything,
means we should soon see this landing onto PlayStation 3. Doesnt it sound like a godsend for everybody?
From my gamers eyes it is.
Tags: Cloud, Cloud Gaming, Gamification, Non, Video Games

Dear Students,

For End term practical of seminar make a report (spiral binding) in the following format:
1.Front Page
2.Abstract & Title page
3.Introduction
4.Literature review
5.Theoretical implementation
6.Practical implementation(Only algorithm/ block diagram for new research is required
in report file but bring code with you in pen drive if any)
7.Result
8.Conclusion and future scope
9.References
10.Research paper [with your name and your supervisor name]
Best of Luck for exams.

M. Jarschel, D. Schlosser, S. Scheuring, and T. Ho_feld. An evaluation of

qoe in cloud gaming based on subjective tests. In Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS), 2011 Fifth International
Conference on, pages 330{335. IEEE, 2011.