By Mitch Simcoe, Director, Solutions Marketing at Ciena
After almost a year of lockdown due to COVID-19, the travel destinations
for many remain on hold. However, there is one game that has removed all
boundaries of traveling around the world. A game that allows you to visit some
of your dream destinations and see some of the most renowned locations
worldwide. Although it is completely virtual, the realism is breathtaking to
the degree that the imagery you're seeing is being pulled from Bing Maps
Satellite imagery and projected onto your screen in an augmented reality (AR)
approach.
Flight Simulator (Sim) 2020
highlights a transition within the gaming industry where the networks are
engineered with edge computing to locate servers closer to the end users which
is known as cloud gaming. In order to deliver such a realistic gaming
experience, Flight Sim is incorporating a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
approach - similar to streaming a movie from Netflix - where the most
frequently requested scenes that gamers fly to are cached at the network edge
for the lowest latency performance.
Gaming at
the edge will really drive the opportunity for cloud gaming that still in its
infancy of mass adoption. The initial install of Flight Sim 2020 requires a 130
GB download and needs frequent 1 GB updates.
Moving to a pure cloud gaming model will allow gamers to avoid these
updates and even eliminate the need for an advanced gaming desktop. Gaming at
the edge and cloud gaming will rely on the underlying telecom network to
maintain the high performance of a local gaming set up.
On the
EDGE of my seat
Microsoft exclusive Flight Simulator 2020 is leading the charge of
gaming at the edge. It leverages the cloud to recreate Earth and build an
immersive and realistic experience. The game presents the challenge of learning
how to operate and pilot more than 30 different aircraft model planes in a
realistic simulation. You select the type of aircraft to fly, your origin and
destination airports, and even the flight plan similar to what commercial
pilots actually do.
For some context, Flight Simulator is one of Microsoft's oldest and
longest-running titles - first introduced nearly 30 years ago.
And, while previous versions gained popularity way before the cloud in
the networking world became table stakes, the latest version of Flight Sim
pulls in more than two petabytes of Bing Maps satellite imagery. It also relies
on artificial intelligence to extrapolate geometry from a blend of satellite
and flyover imagery, giving the gamer a more realistic virtual flight. The game
features 3D replica models of buildings, airports, natural terrain, and
virtually every square kilometer of the planet. Microsoft has recreated the
world as we know it with unlimited exploration capabilities. Flight Sim comes
alive as gamers can fly in real-world weather conditions with live air traffic
and physics perfectly replicating air turbulence. An impressive feat of this
magnitude that is extremely data-intensive could have only been made possible
through the cloud.
Flight Sim's model is very similar to augmented reality in the case that
the satellite imagery is the reality, and the plane is the digital element
being overlayed. This is only the start of a shift within the gaming industry
where hyperscale cloud capabilities are delivering more interactive and immersive
experiences. But are today's networks built to support the required high
performance and low latency Service-level Agreements (SLAs) this oncoming
evolution of gaming at the cloud edge will require on a wider scale?
It's all
about the Network
Edge cloud inherently transforms the gaming model as we know it. A
high-bandwidth internet connection is required to deliver the content being
streamed from the data centers directly to the user. The success of game
performance depends heavily on the underlying networks and how much
controlled-latency traffic they can support during periods of peak demand. The
sheer number of gamers within 2020 alone approximated 2.69 billion and this
number is only projected to rise
annually. It is the role of service providers to ensure their networks are
reliable in handling the traffic surge, hopefully resulting in a consistent
gameplay experience being delivered to end-users. Network analytics and
automation are vital in displaying a holistic view to service providers of
their network's performance and allowing them to efficiently meet bandwidth
demand.
This is a great value-add opportunity for service providers to create
network slices with specific SLAs to support cloud gaming and host the edge
cloud infrastructure in edge data centers for their customers. For instance,
cloud gaming can greatly influence and enable the in-game mechanics and
graphical capabilities of games. Less data is being stored locally and instead of
being pulled directly from the data centers. From a gamer's standpoint, this is
a huge opportunity and leads to the many pros associated with cloud gaming. It
eliminates the need to install games and title updates, as the hardware does
not define the game's performance and you are able to play across a plethora of
devices.
Flight Simulator 2020 excels in highlighting the role of the cloud in
gaming. The onus on service providers to deliver these capabilities at scale is
to employ an adaptable, intelligently automated network infrastructure enhanced
through edge cloud that can scale up or down in real-time, self-optimizing the
available resources to peak demands. Cloud gaming sets the stage for mainstream
services to begin truly leveraging the full potential of edge cloud networks.
Additionally, Flight Simulator has more recently offered a virtual
reality (VR) version of the game that is further demanding in terms of
bandwidth, network performance, and leveraging 5G capabilities. Between cloud
gaming and VR/AR applications, the cloud edge model becomes even more ideal to
support these new immersive experiences. Network providers' stake in the gaming
industry will only continue to grow as 5G is adopted on a massive scale. Cloud
gaming could very well be the next technology boom that has gamers flying to
new, unimagined heights.
‘If you build it, they will come,' and the same goes for network
infrastructures supporting the next flight path of the future.
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About the Author
Mitch Simcoe, Director, Solution Marketing
Mitch is the director of solution marketing at Ciena where he is responsible for supporting utilities to modernize and automate their networks and positioning Ciena’s solutions for Edge Cloud.
Mitch Simcoe has more than 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry starting with Bell Canada and later with Nortel in numerous roles in marketing and product management in groups including voice switching, broadband access and optical networking. He later joined GENBAND as the director of application marketing and built an application showcase for communication-enabled IT applications.
He received a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) and a MBA (Marketing) from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.