Evolving Mobile Cloud Gaming with 5G Standalone Network Telemetry

TL;DR

Telesa is presented, 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.

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.

Figures (18)

• Figure 1: TGaming: System Overview.TGaming'sCloud Gaming Server receives exact capacity estimates of the 5G Standalone Radio Access Network from TGaming's5G Standalone Telemetry Server, thus adjusting its video resolution and frame rate to accommodate the RAN's capacity. While the scope of this paper is mobile cloud gaming, our telemetry tool is general, estimating spare capacity for any end-to-end transport protocol or application.
• Figure 2: Overview of TGaming's overall architecture.
• Figure 3: Video capture and scheduling components at the TGaming game streaming server.
• Figure 4: The possible situations with bottleneck in different position of the network.
• Figure 5: NG-Scope5G telemetry design overview: NG-Scope5G passively listens to raw radio data and decodes radio resource control messages and DCIs from it. NG-Scope5G's processing components are denoted by a black background.