[game_edu] C-Game 2014 CFP -- Cloud Gaming Systems and Networks Workshop

[Maha Abdallah]

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The First International Workshop on Cloud Gaming Systems and Networks 
(C-Game 2014)
                           July 14/18, 2014, Chengdu, China
                     https://sites.google.com/site/icmecgames2014/

In conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 
(ICME 2014)
                                http://www.icme2014.org/
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Important Dates:
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Paper submission:             	March 23, 2014
Notification of acceptance:   	April 9, 2014
Camera-ready submission:      	April 16, 2014 (no extension)


Theme and Scope:
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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. Cloud gaming can be single player, 
where a user plays the game on his/her own, or multiplayer, where 
multiple geographically distributed users play with or against each 
other. 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 to join in 2014.

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum that brings together 
multimedia researchers and practitioners from various facets of 
multimedia topics and allows them to have active discussions and 
interactions on the clearly focused, hot, and emerging topic of Cloud 
Gaming. We encourage discussions based on the presented papers to 
advance the state-of-the-art and to identify current and future research 
topics.

Topics of Interest
There are currently three types of cloud gaming architectures: graphics 
streaming, video streaming, and their combination. In graphics steaming, 
the game objects are represented by 3D models and textures, and these 
are streamed to players as needed. Rendering of the game is done at the 
client, but the game logic runs in the cloud and the state of the game 
(position and orientation of objects, as well as actions and events) is 
streamed to clients as an update message. The advantage of graphics 
streaming is that update messages are small and do not require much 
bandwidth. But the rendering at the client requires computational power 
as well as 3D graphics rendering hardware or software. In video 
streaming, the cloud not only executes the game logic, but also the game 
rendering. The resulting game scene is then streamed to clients as 
video. The advantage here is that as long as the client can display 
video, which pretty much all smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and 
most other mobile devices today do, the user can play the game without 
needing 3D graphics rendering hardware or software, making cloud gaming 
accessible to a huge market of mass consumers. The disadvantage is 
two-folds: First, video based cloud gaming requires high bandwidth. For 
example, OnLive requires a wired network connection with no less than 
5Mbps constant bandwidth per player to provide interactive gaming 
services with a resolution of 720p at 30fps. Second, video based cloud 
gaming is sensitive to network latencies which impair the interactive 
experience of a video game. 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. In addition, the mobility of today’s player 
poses another set of challenges. Due to the heterogeneity of players’ 
devices, the server has to adapt the game content to the characteristics 
and limitations of the client’s underlying network or end device. These 
include limitations in the available network bandwidth, or limitations 
in the client device’s processing power, memory, display size, battery 
life, or the user’s download limits as per his/her mobile subscription 
plan. While some of these restrictions are becoming less problematic due 
to rapid progress in mobile hardware technologies, battery life in 
particular and download limit to some extent are still problems that 
must be seriously considered. Also, consuming more bandwidth or 
computational power, even if available, means consuming more battery.

In this workshop, we seek original papers that propose new approaches, 
methods, systems, and solutions that overcome the above shortcomings. 
Specifically, we seek papers in the following and similar topics:

   • adaptive video/graphics streaming according to player’s device 
limitations
   • methods to speed up video coding and video/graphics streaming at the 
cloud side
   • methods to decrease the required bandwidth while maintaining 
gameplay quality
   • energy-efficient video/graphics streaming based on player’s device 
battery and download limitations
   • energy-efficient cloud computing for game rendering and video coding 
at the server side
   • cloud-player latency improvement and delay mitigation techniques
   • player-cloud and player-player interactions: effects of delay and 
visual quality limitations on gameplay, and methods to improve them
   • optimizing cloud infrastructure and server distribution to 
efficiently support globally distributed players
   • cloud support for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG)
   • cloud gaming traffic measurement, modeling, benchmarking, and 
performance evaluation
   • cloud support for serious games

Paper submissions should be at most 6 pages long and must cover one of 
the above or similar topics. 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.


Workshop Chairs:
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    Shervin Shirmohammadi (shervin at discover.uottawa.ca), University of 
Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
    Maha Abdallah (Maha.Abdallah at lip6.fr), Pierre & Marie Curie 
University (UPMC), Paris, France
    Dewan Tanvir Ahmed (dahmed at uncc.edu), University of North Carolina at 
Charlotte, Charlotte, USA