International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication
A new business model for massively multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance engineering
Dealing with heterogeneity for mapping MMOFPS in distributed systems
Euro-Par 2010 Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Parallel processing
Dynamic scalability for next generation gaming infrastructures
Proceedings of the 4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques
RTSenv: an experimental environment for real-time strategy games
Proceedings of the 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
Dynamic reallocation rules on multi-server web-based MORPG system
International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing
Dynamic resource provisioning for cloud-based gaming infrastructures
Computers in Entertainment (CIE) - Theoretical and Practical Computer Applications in Entertainment
QoS-Aware Revenue-Cost Optimization for Latency-Sensitive Services in IaaS Clouds
DS-RT '12 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE/ACM 16th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications
SLA-based operation of massively multiplayer online games in competition-based environments
Proceedings of the International C* Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering
Autonomous massively multiplayer online game operation on unreliable resources
Proceedings of the International C* Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering
Autonomic operation of massively multiplayer online games in clouds
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Cloud and Autonomic Computing Conference
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
Scheduling jobs in the cloud using on-demand and reserved instances
Euro-Par'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel Processing
An Efficient Gaming User Oriented Load Balancing Scheme for MMORPGs
Wireless Personal Communications: An International Journal
Characterization of Human Mobility in Networked Virtual Environments
Proceedings of Network and Operating System Support on Digital Audio and Video Workshop
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Today's Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) can include millions of concurrent players spread across the world and interacting with each other within a single session. Faced with high resource demand variability and with misfit resource renting policies, the current industry practice is to overprovision for each game tens of self-owned data centers, making the market entry affordable only for big companies. Focusing on the reduction of entry and operational costs, we investigate a new dynamic resource provisioning method for MMOG operation using external data centers as low-cost resource providers. First, we identify in the various types of player interaction a source of short-term load variability, which complements the long-term load variability due to the size of the player population. Then, we introduce a combined MMOG processor, network, and memory load model that takes into account both the player interaction type and the population size. Our model is best used for estimating the MMOG resource demand dynamically, and thus, for dynamic resource provisioning based on the game world entity distribution. We evaluate several classes of online predictors for MMOG entity distribution and propose and tune a neural network-based predictor to deliver good accuracy consistently under real-time performance constraints. We assess using trace-based simulation the impact of the data center policies on the quality of resource provisioning. We find that the dynamic resource provisioning can be much more efficient than its static alternative even when the external data centers are busy, and that data centers with policies unsuitable for MMOGs are penalized by our dynamic resource provisioning method. Finally, we present experimental results showing the real-time parallelization and load balancing of a real game prototype using data center resources provisioned using our method and show its advantage against a rudimentary client threshold approach.