Toward a mobile gaming based-computation offloading

3D Video games are considered as one of the most complex applications in the market, due to their real-time constraint and high computational requirements. Compared to

dedicated gaming boxes (e.g., Xbox and PlayStation), mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, still fail to achieve interactive rendering rates, even with low gaming requirements. Two solutions are offered to mobile gamers, leveraging resourceful platforms. The first one is the cloud gaming; wherein the entire game engine is hosted on dedicated servers in the cloud. The servers render the frames and stream back an encoded video to the player. The latter interacts with the servers through

Human Interface Device (HID), and uses a decoder to display the streamed video. The second solution is known as computation offloading that consists in migrating parts of tasks of the game engine (the most resource consuming) to a remote powerful

computer hosted in the cloud or at the network edge (using the concept of Edge computing). On the successful execution, the results are sent back to the mobile device for integration with the rest of the application inside the mobile device. In this paper, we unveil an offloading solution to improve the performance of one of the most popular game engines in the market, namely "Unity 3D". Using a testbed composed of a smartphone and a server, we evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed solution by report to the classical solution (i.e., running all the game on the smartphone); particularly focusing on the ability to improve the capacity of the smartphone to run complex games.