2015 - Special Issue on Visual Computing in the Cloud: Cloud Gaming and Virtualization

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY
Special Issue on Visual Computing in the Cloud: Cloud Gaming and Virtualization
Part of Visual Computing in the Cloud Special Issue Series
Online gaming systems, which mix various multimedia such as image, video, audio, and graphics to enable players
to interact with each other over the Internet, are now widely used not just for entertainment, but also for socializing,
business, commerce, scientific experimentation, and many other practical purposes. Gaming is now a multi-billion
dollar industry all over the world, having already surpassed the much longer-established film and music industries,
and generating more revenue than each of cinema and DVD/BlueRay industries. Cloud gaming, the newest entry in
the online gaming world, leverages the well-known concept of cloud computing to provide online gaming services
to players. The idea in cloud gaming is to process the game events in the cloud and to stream the game to the
players. Since it uses the cloud, scalability, server bottlenecks, and server failures are alleviated to a great extent,
helping it become more popular in both research and industry, with companies such as OnLive, StreamMyGame,
Gaikai, G-Cluster, OTOY, Spoon, CiiNOW, with Sony and Microsoft having joined in 2014.
Cloud gaming can be done with graphics steaming, where game objects are represented by 3D models and textures
and are streamed to players’ end devices which then do the rendering of the game, or with video streaming, where
the cloud not only executes the game logic, but also the game rendering, and streams the resulting game scene to the
players’ end devices as video. It is also possible to use a hybrid approach and to simultaneously mix graphics
streaming with video streaming, as is done in CiiNO, for example. Each of these methods has its strengths and
weaknesses, balancing bandwidth and delay limitations with wider accessibility and possibility to run the game on
thin clients. In addition, due to the mobility of today’s players and the heterogeneity of their’ devices, the server has
to adapt the game content to the characteristics and limitations of both the underlying network and the end devices.
These include variations in the available network bandwidth, or player devices’ limitations in processing power,
memory, display size, battery life, or download limits. Finally, there is the challenge of configuration, deployment,
and maintenance of the game in the cloud. The virtualization of screen rendering in the cloud is still an understudied
area. An even less addressed area is how to leverage the virtual screen in the cloud and combine it with local
rendering capabilities to give the same or even better user experiences across different devices. Breakthroughs may
come with the introduction of a new application interface model for cloud computing, with which developers never
have to worry about where data storage, program execution and screen rendering actually occur, since cloud services
will adaptively and optimally distribute storage, execution and rendering among the cloud and clients.
Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
? Adaptive video/graphics streaming according to network/player’s limitations
? Methods to speed up video coding and video/graphics streaming at the cloud side
? Methods to decrease video/graphics bandwidth while maintaining gameplay quality
? Energy-efficient cloud computing for game rendering and video coding at the server side
? Quality of Experience (QoE) studies and improvements for cloud gaming: player-cloud and player-player
interactions, effects of delay and visual quality limitations on gameplay, and methods to improve them
? Efficient capturing, processing, and streaming of Kinect-like, Wii-like, gesture, touch, and similar gaming
interface data to the cloud
? Game as a Service (GaaS)
? Optimizing cloud infrastructure and server distribution to efficiently support globally distributed players
? Cloud gaming traffic measurement, modeling, benchmarking, and performance evaluation
? Resource allocation and load balancing in the cloud for optimized game play
? Network routing, software defined networking (SDN), virtualization, and on-demand dynamic control of
the cloud infrastructure
? Hybrid video/graphics data format and standard for game virtualization and streaming
? Virtualization of large volume user inputs (e.g., depth sensor video) in the cloud
? Novel architectures and designs of using Cloud Gaming services for applications such as Massively
Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), Serious Games, Mobile Games, etc.
We especially encourage experience papers describing lessons learned from built systems, including working
approaches, unexpected results, common abstractions, and metrics for evaluating and improving cloud gaming
systems.
Important Dates
Initial Paper Submission: September 1, 2014
Initial Paper Decision: December 1, 2014
Revised Paper Submission: February 1, 2015
Revised Paper Decision: May 1, 2015
Final Paper Submission: July 1, 2015
Final Paper Decision: September 1, 2015
Publication Date: December 2015
Manuscript submissions and reviewing process
Submission of a paper to CSVT is permitted only if the paper has not been submitted, accepted,
published, or copyrighted in another journal. Papers that have been published in conference and workshop
proceedings may be submitted for consideration to CSVT provided that (i) the authors cite their earlier
work; (ii) the papers are not identical; and (iii) the journal publication includes novel elements (e.g., more
comprehensive experiments). For submission information, please consult the IEEE CSVT Information for
Authors: http://tcsvt.polito.it/authors.html.
Guest Editors
Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada shervin-AT-eecs.uottawa.ca
Maha Abdallah Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris, France Maha.Abdallah-AT-lip6.fr
Dewan Tanvir Ahmed University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA dahmed-AT-uncc.edu
Kuan-Ta Chen Academia Sinica, Taiwan ktchen-AT-iis.sinica.edu.tw
Yan Lu Microsoft Research Asia, China yanlu-AT-microsoft.com
Alex Snyatkov OnLive, Palo Alto, CA, USA alex.snyatkov-AT-onlive.com