Mobile Games at the Edge: A Performance Evaluation to Guide Resource Capacity Planning

ABSTRACT

Mobile games are very popular among young generations, especially during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has caused an enormous increase in data transactions and computation over the Internet. Computing for games often consumes a vast amount of computational resources. Nowadays, mobile devices require heavy computing tasks. For this reason, edge computing resources are essentially needed in the game industry for non-latency data transactions. However, edge computing involves many aspects that make its architecture highly complex to evaluate. Pure performance evaluation of such computing systems is necessary for real-world mobile edge computing systems (MEC) in the game industry. This paper proposes a closed queuing network to evaluate the performance of a game execution scenario in MEC. The model permits the evaluation of the following metrics mean response time, drop rate, and utilization level. The results indicate that the variation in the number of physical machines (PM) and virtual machines (VM) has a similar impact on the system's overall performance. The results also show that dropped messages can be avoided by making small calibrations on the capabilities of the VM/PM resources. Finally, this study seeks to assist the development of game computing systems at MEC without the need for prior expenses with real infrastructures.