A server-assisted approach for mobile-phone games

While the processing power of mobile devices is continuously increasing, the network bandwidth is getting larger and the latency is going down, the heterogeneity of terminals with respect to operating systems, hardware and software makes it impossible to massively deploy mobile games. We propose a novel architecture consisting of (1) maintaining on the terminal only standardized operations (2) using a remote server for the game's logic and (3) updating the local scene by using compact commands. By identifying the game tasks that should remain local, we first analyze the performances of MPEG-4 3D graphics standard. We implemented an MPEG-4 player able to decode and visualize 3D and extended it for handling game content. We propose a client-server architecture and a communication protocol that ensure similar user experience while using a standard player - expected to be available on mobile devices in the near future.