Integer and combinatorial optimization
Integer and combinatorial optimization
A communication architecture for massive multiplayer games
NetGames '02 Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games
A generic proxy system for networked computer games
NetGames '02 Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Network and system support for games
SODA: A Service-On-Demand Architecture for Application Service Hosting Utility Platforms
HPDC '03 Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
Evaluating the Performance of Middleware Load Balancing Strategies
EDOC '04 Proceedings of the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, Eighth IEEE International
Interest management middleware for networked games
Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games
Locality aware dynamic load management for massively multiplayer games
Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Dynamic microcell assignment for massively multiplayer online gaming
NetGames '05 Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Design and implementation of a novel dynamic load balancing library for cluster computing
Parallel Computing - Heterogeneous computing
An Active Self-Optimizing Multiplayer Gaming Architecture
Cluster Computing
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Task assignment with work-conserving migration
Parallel Computing
SLA based resource allocation policies in autonomic environments
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Load balancing for massively multiplayer online games
NetGames '06 Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Adaptive Support of Range Queries via Push-Pull Algorithms
Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation
A platform for dynamic microcell redeployment in massively multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Optimistic load balancing in a distributed virtual environment
Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
Evaluating Steiner-tree heuristics and diameter variations for application layer multicast
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
International Journal of Computers and Applications
Service Middleware for Self-Managing Large-Scale Systems
IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
Dynamic load balancing in distributed virtual environments using heat diffusion
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP)
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Distributed virtual environments and massively multiplayer online games in particular have been on the rise for several years now. They offer huge digital environments characterized by tens of thousands of users interacting with each other. Efficiently managing these online worlds requires scalable architectures to distribute the load over multiple servers and maintain a high Quality of Experience (QoE). This need will only increase as online virtual worlds become more and more popular. A traditional approach to improve the scalability of this type of system is to statically partition the virtual world in smaller segments called cells, each assigned to a dedicated server. In this paper a novel approach of dividing the virtual world into even smaller parts called microcells is introduced. Critical in this approach are the algorithms that manage the microcell allocation over the available servers. These algorithms must face a number of challenges and have as a central goal to keep the load experienced by the servers below a given threshold. On one hand, clustering interacting microcells on one server allows to limit the overall load by minimizing the communication overhead. On the other hand, locating too many microcells on one server may cause the load to violate the threshold value, resulting in an overload situation. In this paper we present a number of algorithms that determine the microcell allocation and runtime adaptations of the microcell allocation to optimize the deployment. We evaluate the microcell approach by studying the impact of the microcell size and the number of servers. The efficiency of the algorithms in terms of their ability to decrease the maximum server load and their capability to maintain an ideal deployment in dynamic environments is also studied.