Researcher(s)
Zehua (David) Wang, Victor Leung, Juntao Zhao, Yuanfang Chi
Date of Publication
Description
By rendering game scenes on the remote cloud and delivering real-time video to end devices via the Internet, cloud gaming enables players to access game services anytime anywhere despite the hardware capacity of their terminals. However, as a commercial service, the state-of-the-art payment models for cloud gaming are still in their preliminary stages. In this paper, we reveal the shortages of existing cloud gaming pricing models and propose CloudArcade, a token-based cloud gaming system that employs blockchain-empowered cryptocurrency as a payment method for the players using the cloud gaming services. By using cryptocurrency, CloudArcade provides a transparent and resource-aware pricing method, it also enables a time irrelevant silent payment on the floating price to protects users' payment. These features eliminate the quality of experience degradation caused by the spot price in the traditional dynamic pricing model on the QoE-aware service pricing. We also employ the payment channel in CloudArcade to improve the system performance. Discussions on service pricing criteria are put forward, open issues about token issuing and malicious resource speculation are also reviewed. We believe the design of CloudArcade can show a good generality on other QoE-aware and human-centered applications.
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