Dr. Florian Metzger

The second wave of cloud gaming services is currently gaining traction. But we are still not sure of the subjective experience of games streamed over these services when compared to them running locally. Your task in this work would be to design the methodology for a crowdsourcing QoE assessment for cloud gaming, execute it and subsequently evaluate its results.

Modern cities have complex interactions of vehicular, pedestrian and wireless networks. Any communal wireless network should strive to fullfil these demands. Your task would be to create a model of the city of Würzburg in SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) and OMNeT++ in order to evaluate Würzburg's (wireless) traffic demands and subsequently optimize them.

Video games with a competitive multiplayer modes must deal with the troubles of high and varying end-to-end lag. They can employ varying methods to manage, mitigate or conceal this lag and equalize it between different clients. But the closed source nature of video games makes examining the effectiveness of these mechanisms hard. Your job is to implement a simple video game prototype from scratch that uses an authoritative client-server multiplayer approach and implements such lag mitigation mechanisms. With this prototype we want to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of these lag concealment measures.

Recently, Cloud Gaming services have once again risen in popularity, with more and more commercial offerings becoming available. Your job in this thesis would be to investigate and compare these services on a technical level and based on their network characteristics.

Determining the E2E lag of actions in video games is not trivial since there is no built-in way to grasp the full lag, including that contributed by the input and output. A standardized method is to record both input and output with a high framerate camera and count the frames from a visible input event to the result on screen. Your job is to perform these measurements for different actions in a series of games, and examine the overhead game streaming generates for them. Note: It might currently not be possible to perform these experiments, as they rely on a physical testbench.

Video games have a long history of often competitive multiplayer modes, supported by various network implementations in their engines. The source code of many of these games has been open sourced over the years, opening their netcode up for examination. Your job is to extract the netcode from some of these games and compare them to each other. We want to find out, how the employed mechanisms have changed over time and how well they would fare in today's environment.

Many new queue management techniques and supporting technologies are currently being developed, standardized and rolled out. CoDel, Cake, PIE, DualPI just to name a few. Your job is to develop a portable virtual environment that allows for realistic tests and comparisons of these methods with automated test suits.

The Quality of Service and associated Quality of Experience that networked games provide to a user are susceptible to many influences. Network conditions are a known factor, when it comes to evaluating the synchronization of clients that partake in the same game, as well as the server. Compared to prior work, that either only focused on a small parameter space or used theoretical approaches that did not factor in the effects different game and engine settings can have, this was the target of this thesis. By implementing a fully automated testbed, utilizing an Unreal Engine 4 game prototype, a multitude of different parameter sets could be tested and evaluated. This was done by observing character locations and replicated movement information, and printing them to log files. Instead of querying humans for perceived QoE, spatial and temporal differences between replicated characters and their movement was measured. When evaluating these measurements, insights regarding parameter dependencies and critical measurement influences were gained. This for example includes the necessity of an advanced, unified character movement model to improve evaluation potential.