Dynamic load management for MMOGs in distributed environments

• Authors: Herbert Jordan;Radu Prodan;Vlad Nae;Thomas Fahringer
• Venue: Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Computing frontiers
• Year: 2010

To support thousands of concurrent players in virtual worlds simulated by contemporary Massively Multiplayer Online Games, most implementations employ static game world partitioning for distributing the load among multiple game server instances. Further, the resources that manage the resulting subregions are statically allocated, independent of the actual game load. As a result, due to the high variability of the user demand, this approach leads to a low resource utilization causing much higher provisioning costs than necessary. In addition, the number of players supported by a region is limited by the maximum load that can be handled by a single server instance. We propose in this paper a novel game load management technique divided in two (global and a local) layers, capable of dynamically adjusting the amount of allocated resources to the present user demand. The global level assigns the responsibility of serving particular game regions to data centers using a peer-to-peer infrastructure, while the local level within individual facilities maintains the necessary server instances for the assigned obligations. We device two generic heuristics based on the well-known bin-packing problem to achieve the ultimate goal of maximizing the resource utilization on both levels while maintaining user-level Quality of Service (QoS). We evaluate the performance of our proposed solution using simulation-based experiments, which demonstrate a potential cost reduction in maintaining MMOG sessions by up to 60% while maintaining QoS in 99% of the cases.