Energy consumption analysis of cloud-based video games streaming to mobile devices

Abstract

Within the growing of the gaming industry and mobile technologies, cloud-based video games streaming to mobile devices gains popularity fast. However, several issues and challenges such as user responsiveness, video quality, service quality, operating cost and energy consumption have to be addressed. Previous research studies did not thoroughly investigate the energy consumption of mobile devices used for cloud gaming. This paper focuses on how mobile device energy consumption is impacted by video game content characteristics, transmission protocol and wireless network type. The results show that game content characteristics impact energy consumption (i.e., up to 47% between games at maximum brightness for OLED screens), UDP is more energy efficient than TCP (i.e., up to 13.6%), while WiFi is more energy efficient than 3G (i.e., up to 40%). The outcome of this study can provide beneficial input for adaptive energy efficient cloud-based video games streaming mechanisms.