Mirror: A computation-offloading framework for sophisticated mobile games

The low performance and power limitations of mobile devices severely limit the complexity and the duration of playing sessions of mobile games. This article examines the possibility of using computation-offloading to mitigate these problems while keeping the game playable. We design Mirror, a framework for offloading computation targeted at the demanding performance requirements of sophisticated mobile games. The key conceptual contributions of Mirror are design decisions that allow for dynamic fine-grained client-side offloading decisions, and a protocol for real-time asynchronous offloading for bounding network delays. We implement a prototype of Mirror and test it by performing offloading for the game OpenTTD. The results are promising, showing that Mirror can increase the performance and decrease the power consumption of games while keeping the gameplay fairly smooth.