Cost-Efficient Hosting and Load Balancing of Massively Multiplayer Online Games

1. Cost-Efficient Hosting and Load Balancing of Massively Multiplayer Online Games Nae, V.; Prodan, R.; Fahringer, T.; Grid Computing (GRID), 2010 11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on

2. Outline Introduction Resource allocation Load balancing Experiments Conclusions Reference

3. Introduction Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) grew from 10 thousand subscribers in 1997 to 6.7 million in 2003 and with its accelerating growth rate it is estimated to reach 60 million people by 2011 . The market size shows equally impressive numbers, estimated by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) to 7 billion USD with an avid growth over 300% in the last 10 years. In comparison, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reports a size of 8.99 billion USD and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) a size of 12.3 billion USD which stagnates (and even decreased by 2% ) in the last 10 years.

4. Introduction To accommodate such a huge user load (millions of players), game providers over-provision a large infrastructure, with hundreds to thousands of computers for each game in order to provide the required Quality of Service (QoS). The over-provisioning solution has further negative economic impacts by preventing any but the largest hosting centers from joining the market which dramatically increases prices.

5. Introduction

6. Resource allocation Based on the predicted session and resource load in the next time interval (i.e. typically two minutes), the resource allocation service arranges for the provisioning of the correct amount of resources required for a proper execution that guarantees a good experience to all players. A typical action performed by the resource allocation service is to extend game sessions with new zones or replication servers to accommodate an increased number of players during peak hours.

7. Resource allocation

8. Resource allocation • The effective allocation of resources is realized based on Cloud computing principles, which is a novel approach in the online gaming area presenting significant advantages over the traditional solution of buying and operating own hardware. • Clouds promote the concept of leasing remote resources • Through a new concept of “scaling-by-credit-card” • The concept of hardware virtualization can represent a significant breakthrough for automating the deployment process of game servers

9. Load balancing We designed an event-driven load balancing solution that receives capacity events from the capacity planning service, directs the resource allocation service in taking the appropriate measures.

10. Load balancing

11. Load balancing

12. Load balancing

13. Load balancing

14. Experiments(Cloud Hosting Costs)

15. Experiments(Cloud Hosting Costs)

16. Experiments(Load Balancing) edutain@grid

17. Experiments(Load Balancing)

18. Experiments(Load Balancing)

19. Conclusions We presented a new on-demand prediction-based resource allocation and load balancing method for real-time MMOGs. Experimental results on a demonstrator FPS game on resources owned by a specialized game hosting company demonstrated that our service was able to adjust the number of game servers and load distribution, while maintaining the number of QoS breaches to a value as low as 0.66% from the amount of monitored load events.

20. Reference [1] Nae, V.; Prodan, R.; Fahringer, T.; , "Cost-efficient hosting and load balancing of Massively Multiplayer Online Games," Grid Computing (GRID), 2010 11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on , vol., no., pp.9-16, 25-28 Oct. 2010