Volume 12, Number 6

Towards Fog-Assisted Virtual Reality MMOG with Ultra-Low Latency

  Authors

YOSHIHARA Tsuyoshi and FUJITA Satoshi, Hiroshima University, Japan

  Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to realize a virtual reality MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Video Game) with ultra-low latency. The basic idea of the proposed method is to introduce a layer consisting of several fog nodes between clients and cloud server to offload a part of the rendering task which is conducted by the cloud server in conventional cloud games. We examine three techniques to reduce the latency in such a fog-assisted cloud game: 1) To maintain the consistency of the virtual game space, collision detection of virtual objects is conducted by the cloud server in a centralized manner; 2) To reflect subtle changes of the line of sight to the 3D game view, each client is assigned to a fog node and the head motion of the player acquired through HMD (Head-Mounted Display) is directly sent to the corresponding fog node; and 3) To offload a part of the rendering task, we separate the rendering of the background view from that of the foreground view, and migrate the former to other nodes including the cloud server. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by experiments with an AWS-based prototype system. It is confirmed that the proposed techniques achieve the latency of 32.3 ms, which is 66 % faster than the conventional systems.

  Keywords

Cloud game, fog computing, positional tracking, rendering of 3D game view.