A Novel Game Map Preloading and Resource Provisioning Scheme in Cooperative Cloud Networks

With the popularization of mobile smart devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets), the number of mobile game players increases significantly. This makes mobile gaming industry rise and take up a large piece of global game market. Different from the traditional players playing games on their personal computers with wired local area network or Wi-Fi access, mobile game players nowadays play online games on their smart devices that communicate to cloud servers via wireless cellular networks. Therefore, the monetary cost for game content downloading and updating via cellular networks may increase the burden of gamers. Meanwhile, an unpredictable latency may be introduced by communication links of wireless cellular networks. This may negatively affect player's gaming experience. In fact, we can predict the next movement of the player in the game and preload the maps that have high probability to go. Meanwhile, if any of these maps have been downloaded and cached by other players nearby, with the Device-to-Device (D2D) communication networks, people may preload these maps freely. In this paper, we focus on the problem that how to select maps to preload from either game server or neighborhood with the consideration of limited storage space on smart devices. We first formulate an optimization problem. Since the formulated problem is NP-hard, we decouple the problem into two subproblems and solve them iteratively to get a suboptimal solution. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly increase the utility received by mobile players.