Game-aware bandwidth allocation for home gateways

the widespread availability of high-speed broadband Internet access brings online-enabled revenue model to gaming industry. However, Today’s Internet does not guarantee a quality level beyond best effort for the majority of applications used by home users. As a consequence, data flows transferred over the Internet can experience bandwidth constraints. At homes, this bandwidth constraint becomes more noticeable in the form of delays caused by congestion, if multiple home users with heterogeneous applications share the same home gateway, competing for the same bandwidth. This could lead to impairments and negatively affects players’ Quality of Experience (QoE). In this work, we propose a method to optimize the bandwidth distribution in player’s home network to maximize gaming QoE without starving other concurrent applications. The results of our experiments with a cloud gaming setup shows that our proposed model improves the QoE by reducing the user experienced delay by almost half, while enhancing the game’s video quality by as much as 8%.