Reliable and Low Latency Communication Demonstrated with On-Demand Gaming

When it works you never notice it - but when it fails the user experience is terrible. It is a fundamental property required by many applications on the internet today - namely reliable and low delay communication. If you’ve ever tried video conferencing you know the feeling of distress when the picture and audio constantly breaks up.

Fortunately, you can often resort to old-school methods such as your calling in with your phone. But, if your application is mission/safety critical such fallbacks are not an option!

In the future we expect to see many more applications requiring reliability and low delay across a wide range of industries. E.g. from healthcare with remote robotic surgery to manufacturing and transportation with enhanced safety and remote-control applications.

This may sound like an incredibly hard challenge - and it is! However, we believe one of the key ingredients will be modern erasure coding algorithms (such as RLNC). In the video below, we demonstrate this technology used to improve the experience of an on-demand gaming application. Here the user is playing a game running on a remote server, e.g., a in data center - with a video of the game being streamed to the user.

This imposes very tough requirements on the reliability and latency between the user and data center. Take a look at the video and see the effect of latency, packet loss, and how modern coding technology can improve the performance.

For a more technical description of why latency and reliability are two hard properties to improve - read more in our previous blog post What about the latency, stupid.

If you are interested in this technology or have any questions please contact us.