Evaluation of Packet Wash for Low-Latency High-Bitrate Game Streaming
Mohammadreza Ghafari, Thibault Cholez, Olivier Festor · 2025
The rapid advancement of immersive multimedia applications, such as cloud gaming, necessitates streaming technologies that deliver both low-latency and high-bitrate to ensure a seamless Quality of Experience (QoE). Conventional transport protocols like TCP and UDP often fail to simultaneously meet these demands, with challenges such as bufferbloat exacerbating latency or loss events that disrupt real-time experience in case of congestion. To address these limitations, this study evaluates the packet wash mechanism introduced in the Big Packet Protocol (BPP) and made possible by Scalable Video Coding (SVC), tailored for real-time applications like cloud gaming. The packet wash mechanism can discard on-the-fly higher-quality payload layers in network buffers during congestion events, preventing gameplay interruptions without requiring server-side negotiation or re-encoding. This network-based approach minimizes the effects of congestion compared to traditional bitrate adaptation methods. Experimental results for 2K game streaming demonstrate that the packet wash mechanism preserves visual quality with negligible degradation during sudden bandwidth drops.