Design of distributed microcell-based MMOG hosting platforms: impact study of dynamic relocations

  • Authors:

  • Bruno Bossche;Bart Vleeschauwer;Filip Turck;Bart Dhoedt;Piet Demeester

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University, IBBT, Ghent, Belgium 9050;Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University, IBBT, Ghent, Belgium 9050;Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University, IBBT, Ghent, Belgium 9050;Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University, IBBT, Ghent, Belgium 9050;Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University, IBBT, Ghent, Belgium 9050

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) in particular offer huge digital environments characterized by tens of thousands of simultaneous users. To maintain a high Quality of Experience (QoE) these applications are typically hosted on dedicated server clusters and require custom management software which relies on knowledge of the inner workings of the application.We propose the concept of microcells in the design of an MMOG hosting platform capable of hosting contiguous virtual worlds. Microcells are small parts of the virtual world which can be relocated, allowing to dynamically distribute the load over multiple servers and the use of generic management software. In order to evaluate the impact of microcell relocations, a platform prototype has been designed and evaluated with three microcell specific load balancing algorithms. The obtained evaluation results are presented in this paper and the impact of the microcell relocations are characterized in detail.