Cloud-based game streaming has emerged as a viable way to play games anywhere with a good network connection. While previous research has studied the network turbulence of game streaming traffic, there is as of yet no work exploring how cloud-based game streaming responds to rival connections on a congested network. This paper presents experiments measuring and comparing the network response for three popular commercial streaming services - Google Stadia, NVidia GeForce Now, and Amazon Luna - competing with TCP flows on a congested network. Analysis of the bitrates, loss and latency show that the three systems have different adaptations to network congestion and vary in their fairness to competing TCP flows sharing a bottleneck link.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Slides: pptx

See also:

• Xiaokun Xu and Mark Claypool. A First Look at the Network Turbulence for Google Stadia Cloud-based Game Streaming, In Proceedings of the IEEE Global Internet Symposium (GI), Virtual Conference, May 10, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/stadia-net-gi-21/

• Mark Claypool, David Finkel, Alexander Grant and Michael Solano. On the Performance of OnLive Thin Client Games, Springer Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ) - Special Issue on Network Systems Support for Games, Volume 20, Issue 5, Pages 471-484, DOI 10.1007/s00530-014-0362-4, February 2014. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/onlive-journal/