# A Network Analysis on Cloud Gaming: Stadia, GeForce Now and PSNow
###### Abstract  
Cloud gaming is a class of services that promises to revolutionize the videogame market. It allows the user to play a videogame with essential equipment while using a remote server for the actual execution. The multimedia content is streamed through the network from the server to the user. Hence, this service requires low latency and a large bandwidth to work properly with low response time and high-definition video. Three of the leading tech companies (Google, Sony, and NVIDIA) entered this market with their products, and others, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also launching their platforms. However, these companies have released little information about their cloud gaming operation and how they utilize the network. In this work, we study cloud gaming services from the network point of view. We collect more than 200 packet traces under different application settings and network conditions from a broadband network to poor mobile network conditions, for 3 cloud gaming services, namely Stadia from Google, GeForce Now from NVIDIA and PS Now from Sony. We analyze the employed protocols and the workload that they impose on the network. We find that GeForce Now and Stadia use the RTP protocol to stream the multimedia content, with the latter relying on the standard WebRTC APIs. Depending on the network and video quality, they result in bandwidth-hungry services consuming up to 45 Mbit/s. PS Now instead uses only undocumented protocols and never exceeds 13 Mbit/s. 4G mobile networks can often sustain these loads, while traditional 3G connections struggle. The systems quickly react to deteriorated network conditions, and packet losses up to 5% do not cause a reduction in resolution. cloud gaming; network measurements; mobile networks +
Footnote †: journal: Computer Engineering  
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user. This paradigm implies that the user terminal no longer needs to be equipped with powerful hardware, like graphic processing units (GPUs), to play with recent demanding games, but only requires a fast and reliable communication with the cloud. These new platforms promise to revolutionize the videogame industry, which has steadily increased in recent decades from basically a non-existing market in the 1970s to an estimated USD 159.3 billion sales in 2020, and 2.7 billion players worldwide [2]. The videogame sector is even estimated to be the most lucrative sector in the whole entertainment market, recently surpassing television. Given these facts, the success of cloud gaming services would be of massive importance for the companies promoting it and for the Internet network handling the resulting traffic. Google, NVIDIA, and Sony announced three different proprietary platforms for cloud gaming, namely, Stadia, GeForce Now, and PS Now. When writing this paper (September 2021), these services are available to users as a complete product. Microsoft also proposed its platform named xCloud, which is currently being tested. Amazon recently announced Luna, which is currently under testing as well. The companies disclosed a limited amount of information about the infrastructure of such services and how they utilize the network in terms of employed protocols and bandwidth usage. In this work, we target the three cloud mentioned gaming services, and offer a preliminary characterization of the network workload that they generate. We collect 225 packet traces under different application settings and network conditions. Leveraging these data, we show which protocols that each application adopts for streaming multimedia content, the volume of traffic that they generate, and the servers and domains that they contact (for brevity, we use, throughout the paper, the term domain referring to the fully qualified domain name).