The world today has nearly 2.69 billion players spread across the globe. Gaming culture is spreading like wildfire and more and more people are spending their time playing games. Mobile gaming has emerged as the industry’s rising star as the most convenient platform for on-the-go users. The United State alone is a home for roughly 209 million mobile gamers. While these numbers may sound humongous, there is still a lot of potential gaming has for the world. The introduction of 5G is all set to open gates of opportunities for the whole gaming community. 

5G directly translates to reduced latency, low jitter, and less pocket loss in mobile gaming. uRLLC is going to be a key commercialized feature of 5G, it stands for Ultra-Reliable & Low Latency Communication, which is meant to provide a strong and fast responsive connection to the players. 5G is meant to support nearly 5ms end-to-end latency which is perfect to transmit real-time. 

To put it in simpler terms, it would be affected to milliseconds level cutting the whole period by 4 to 5 times. In the gaming field, especially competitive gaming this change would be humongous. Every part of the gaming system has its own built-in latency timing. Generally, the human brain takes 20 milliseconds to process what they watch on screen and then even more time to decide reactions. With latency time getting smaller, players would have a more authentic experience and that difference can be the reason for your player’s death and the life which is clearly going to affect the whole gaming experience. CDNs see an excellent opportunity to advance edge computing and application delivery capabilities in order to meet the demands of the new services enabled by uRLLC, while also addressing additional challenges in content routing, management, purging, and security.

Another commercialized feature for 5G is going to eMBB which stands for Enhanced Mobile Broadband, with the sole focus on higher bandwidth and high throughput of the network. 5G is expected to be at least 10 times faster than today’s speed and there is surely going to be an uprise in the demand for HD videos consumption for both individual as well as an industrial section which is going to take network traffic load to a whole new level. Intelligent security in manufacturing, for example, necessitates the addition of a large number of HD cameras to the network, and ultra HD videos will be produced and uploaded on a continuous basis. To alleviate the massive load on origins and the central network, CDNs must provide more advanced acceleration, load balancing, and storage capabilities at the edge. CDNs will need to play a larger role in the early stages of 5G than they did in the 4G era.

5G will also take augmented reality to the next level by enabling more immersive games. Consider Pokémon Go, where photos of animated characters are simply overlaid onto the feeds of the actual world utilizing mobile phone cameras — an experience created even less appealing by the drain on battery life. These kinds of limitations are what cause many mobile phone users to turn off one‘s AR capabilities entirely. When combined with edge computing, 5G will efficiently address these issues, and games will perform the majority of their processing on the edge without users even realizing it. Ar systems also take a substantial amount of processing for object recognition, among many other items, and in-destination AR games (where multiple people play the same game in the same location), similar data must be produced on every device independently. However, with edge computing, this redundancy can be eliminated, allowing certain data to be processed only once before being streamed to multiple users. Overall, this will result in a more entertaining and precise AR experience, as well as an improved mobile AR gaming experience and battery life.

Gaming communities today are not just limited to players of esports, they also have other participants such as spectators, commentators, and many other who would have a far better experience with 5G becoming mainstream. 5G would offer high-definition video streaming on the go and in real-time. If done correctly, the viewer can follow numerous players across multiple screens, each powered by a different provider, all without lag. Indeed, during 2019’s Milan Games week, 5G made its first grand appearance for professional gamers, effectively continuing to support the finals of the first live video game tournament on Vodafone Italy’s 5G network.

From headsets and glasses to vests and gloves, the gaming world is entering a new sensory frontier, promising spine-tingling realism and, most importantly, fun. Future games will include life-like haptic in virtual worlds, providing us with the physiological rush as real-world movements and sensations. To accomplish this, wearable devices should be constructed on a similar architecture and with the same developer tools like mobile phones, enabling them to benefit from cloud services and network features in the same way.

When it comes to effective headsets, digital phones will be the foundation. However, unless a consumer is very interested in what is fueling them, they will never know. We’ve released two full-fledged games for the Magic Leap, an AR headset. Both it and Oculus Quest for VR are using mobile phone technology in the background and are based on that type of hardware. Whether it’s a smartphone or a next-generation headset, they all perform similarly. 

As per plans phase 3 of 5G is expected to feature mMTC which stands for Massive Machine Type of Communications. It is meant to support a higher density of devices along with long-range transmission at more economical rates while supporting long battery backup making it a perfect Internet of Things application. A massive number of sensors will be connected to the network in industrial and agricultural applications such as oil and gas transportation, temperature monitoring, and humidity control, and a vast amount of data will be generated. To relieve the stress on the origin cloud, the edges will have to manage a significant quantity of computing and storage. Apart from sensors, tens of billions of other “things” will be added to the network as a huge number of 5G base stations are installed. To obtain improved accuracy, CDN network nodes will need to be deployed in higher density. In the past, a node could span a radius of 10 kilometers; currently, the coverage must be decreased to 1 kilometer or even smaller. As a result, the CDN network structure will differ from what we have now.

Finally, we want this to be a smooth experience for everyone. Game providers should be able to leverage network capabilities regardless of which network is being used, and consumers should be able to play games regardless of their individual hardware. There are a number of obstacles that must be overcome in order to achieve this. Game designers will have to figure out how to balance which parts of the processing should be done remotely and which should be done locally to get the greatest potential experience. We must also be aware of tradeoffs and when to use them. Everyone would, in an ideal world, have the appropriate bandwidth and latency for the game they wish to play.

To create the best possible experience, game creators will have to find out how to balance which elements of the processing should be done remotely and which should be done locally. We also need to understand tradeoffs and when to apply them. In a perfect world, everyone would have the necessary bandwidth and latency for the game they want to play. Game designers will have to deal with a whole new degree of network interaction. They may need to notify a network ahead of time of a user’s bandwidth requirements or ask the network how much bandwidth the user will have for the next five minutes, and then adjust the game accordingly. If someone enters a tunnel for 30 seconds, for example, the game may opt to preload some objects or reuse existing local objects without affecting the gameplay experience. Such network APIs will have to be designed not only with the user’s experience in mind but also with the developer’s experience in mind.

Edge caching will assure sub-millisecond TTFB performance while also protecting the core network from overload when ultra-low latency 5G networks become the standard. Gaming (and other ultra-low-latency use cases) require high performance, which can only be achieved by being as near to the end-user/game player as feasible.

At the same time, performance is protected as a result of the ability to save several trips to the core, which generates speed/instantaneity while reducing energy consumption. In essence, you get high-performance content delivery combined with low-energy caching, resulting in a smaller digital footprint and lower environmental impact. Will the benefits of 5G balance the increasing traffic strain in the gaming age? Edge cloud caching tech will aid both in the speed and functions performed for enhanced gaming, as well as minimizing the environmental implications of increased traffic demand in a long-term manner.