Evolving Mobile Cloud Gaming with 5G Standalone Network Telemetry

Abstract

Mobile cloud gaming places the simultaneous demands of high capacity and low latency on the wireless network, demands that Private and Metropolitan-Area Standalone 5G networks are poised to meet. However, lacking introspection into the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), cloud gaming servers are ill-poised to cope with the vagaries of the wireless last hop to a mobile client, while 5G network operators run mostly closed networks, limiting their potential for co-design with the wider internet and user applications. This paper presents Telesa, a passive, incrementally-deployable, and independently-deployable Standalone 5G network telemetry system that streams fine-grained RAN capacity, latency, and retransmission information to application servers to enable better millisecond scale, application-level decisions on offered load and bit rate adaptation than end-to-end latency measurements or end-to-end packet losses currently permit. We design, implement, and evaluate a Telesa telemetry-enhanced game streaming platform, demonstrating exact congestion-control that can better adapt game video bitrate while simultaneously controlling end-to-end latency, thus maximizing game quality of experience. Our experimental evaluation on a production 5G Standalone network demonstrates a 178-249% Quality of Experience improvement versus two state-of-the-art cloud gaming applications.