An open source framework for video streaming in cloud gaming

Abstract Digital games often play the role of vectors for innovations in computer graphics and multimedia. Contemporary digital games feature realistic graphics and complex mechanics, which increase the computational burden of a proper gaming experience; consequently, the costs for customer equipment raises. Cloud gaming is a technique in which a high-performance server running a videogame receives the player’s input and streams the video back to a lightweight client. Currently, available open-source frameworks designed in this scope suffer from deprecation, limited capabilities or strict hardware and operating system dependencies. In this paper, we present a novel open-source framework to define and benchmark architectures for remote rendering of screen content, to provide a platform-agnostic tool for researchers that want to contribute to this area. We run a substantial set of experiments about streaming gaming sessions with different combinations of network conditions, codec parameters and transmission policies, thus collecting network statistics and dumping transmitted and received video frames, finally demonstrating the usability of the provided tools. We show the various features of the framework to profile and perform both an analysis of network statistics and of the stream’s visual quality.