Measurement of the Responses of Cloud-Based Game Streaming to Network Congestion

Cloud-based game streaming has emerged as a viable way to play games anywhere with a good network connection. While previous research has studied the network turbulence of game streaming traffic, there is as of yet no work exploring how cloud-based game streaming responds to rival connections on a congested network. This paper presents experiments measuring and comparing the network response for three popular commercial streaming services - Google Stadia, NVidia GeForce Now, and Amazon Luna - competing with TCP flows on a congested network. Analysis of the bitrates, loss and latency show that the three systems have different adaptations to network congestion and vary in their fairness to competing TCP flows sharing a bottleneck link.