Investigating Users' Quality of Experience in Mobile Cloud Games

Mobile cloud gaming (MCG) is an emerging concept which aims to deliver video games on-demand to users with the use of cloud technologies. Cloud technology allows the offloading of computation from a less powerful user device or thin client to more robust cloud servers to minimize power consumption and provide additional cloud services such as storage. MCG is therefore very helpful that can reduce the costs of expensive hardware, but the challenge is that it requires a high Quality of Service (QoS) in order to stream and play the games where the users have a high Quality of Experience (QoE). The goal of the study is to investigate how users' QoE is affected by network conditions while playing MCG and compare the results from a previous study. A testbed was made in order to conduct subjective tests where users are going to play Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) on a smartphone using Steam Remote Play. The testbed consists of a router, tablet, smartphone, headset, Xbox controller, USB-C multi-port adapter and four different PC's. Participants on campus, both students and non-students, were invited to participate in the experiment. A total of 24 participants completed the tests; however, results from two participants were excluded due to software issues. There were 23 network conditions that was tested for each user and included factors such as round-trip time (RTT), packet losses, bursty jitter, random jitter or combinations of different factors. A multi-platform tool, ALTRUIST, was used to control the applications and facilitate the data collection from the devices and NetEm changed the network conditions. The results showed that the network condition [bj(rtt200i15)] had the highest mean opinion score (MOS) of the QoE of 4.5 for the users with 200 milliseconds of bursty jitter every 15 seconds. The worst network condition tested with the lowest QoE rating of 1.4 was network condition [rtt25pl12] that had 25 milliseconds of RTT and 12% packet losses. There were differences between the male and female participants where the MOS of the QoE results was significantly higher with up to 1.5 MOS QoE rating differences for the females compared to the males in network conditions with RTT with packet losses. However, the sample size was low with only 5 female participants compared to 18 male participants. The MOS of the QoE results separating play time under 10 hours per week and 10 or more hours per week showed no significant changes, where the largest QoE rating difference was 0.5 points. Network condition [rtt25pl12] and [rtt2pl35] had the largest differences in the MOS QoE ratings compared to the previous study, while both was not compared to the same corresponding network condition. The largest difference comparing the same network condition to the previous study was network condition [bj(rtt200i15)] with a difference of 1.1 points higher in the MOS QoE rating