A mirroring architecture for sophisticated mobile games using computation-offloading

Abstract

Mobile gaming is already a popular and lucrative market. However, the low performance and reduced power capacity of mobile devices severely limit the complexity of mobile games and the duration of their game sessions. To mitigate these issues, in this article, we explore using computation-offloading, that is, allowing the compute-intensive parts of mobile games to execute on remote infrastructure. Computation-offloading raises the combined challenge of addressing the trade-offs between performance and power-consumption while also keeping the game playable. We propose Mirror, a system for computation-offloading that supports the demanding performance requirements of sophisticated mobile games. Mirror proposes several conceptual contributions: support for fine-grained partitioning, both offline (set by developers) and dynamic (policy-based), and real-time asynchronous offloading and user-input synchronization protocols that enable Mirror-based systems to bound the delays introduced by offloading and thus to achieve adequate performance. Mirror is compatible with all games that are tick-based and user-input deterministic. We implement a real-world prototype of Mirror and apply it to the real-world, complex, popular game OpenTTD. The experimental results show that, in comparison with the non-offloaded OpenTTD, Mirror-ed OpenTTD can significantly improve performance and power consumption while also delivering smooth gameplay. As a trade-off, Mirror introduces acceptable delay on user inputs.