Dynamic microcell assignment for massively multiplayer online gaming

Vleeschauwer, Bart De; Bossche, Bruno Van Den; Verdickt, Tom; Turck, Filip De; Dhoedt, Bart; Demeester, Piet

doi:10.1145/1103599.1103611

Cited by 58 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…However, in MMORPGs the same virtual world may be shared by thousands of clients, and this is translated into a significant asymmetry between the two traffic directions, which is stressed if a high number of players are fighting in the same place of the virtual world. In order to make this problem affordable, an "area of interest" is usually defined for each virtual character, meaning that only the events happening in that area are transmitted to the client [33]. The increase of the server-to-client traffic, as a function of the number of players in an MMORPG server, was measured in [29].…”

Section: Traffic Models For Online Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the effectiveness of an optimization method for the traffic of TCP-based multiplayer online games

Saldaña

2015

Multimed Tools Appl

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This paper studies the feasibility of using an optimization method, based on multiplexing and header compression, for the traffic of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) using TCP at the Transport Layer. Different scenarios where a number of flows share a common network path are identified. The adaptation of the multiplexing method is explained, and a formula of the savings is devised. The header compression ratio is obtained using real traces of a popular game and a statistical model of its traffic is used to obtain the bandwidth saving as a function of the number of players and the multiplexing period. The obtained savings can be up to 60 % for IPv4 and 70 % for IPv6. A Mean Opinion Score model from the literature is employed to calculate the limits of the multiplexing period that can be used without harming the user experience.The interactions between multiplexed and non-multiplexed flows, sharing a bottleneck with different kinds of background traffic, are studied through simulations. As a result of the tests, some limits for the multiplexing period are recommended: the unfairness between players can be low if the value of the multiplexing period is kept under 10 or 20 ms. TCP background flows using SACK (Selective Acknowledgment) and Reno yield better results, in terms of fairness, than Tahoe and New Reno. When UDP is used for background traffic, high values of the multiplexing period may stress the unfairness between flows if network congestion is severe.

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Section: Traffic Models For Online Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the effectiveness of an optimization method for the traffic of TCP-based multiplayer online games

Saldaña

2015

Multimed Tools Appl

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“…However, players change cell less often, and this avoids some dynamic reassignments during the game. The option of small size cells (microcells) facilitates the initial load balancing distribution but causes greater number of cell movements by players during the game, which implies more dynamic redistribution operations and thus more overhead in the run time [12,17].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

Barri

Roig

Giné

2014

Multimed Tools Appl

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MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) is the most popular genre among network gamers, and now attract millions of users, who play simultaneously in an evolving virtual world. This huge number of concurrent players requires the availability of high performance computation servers. Additionally, gaming aware distribution mechanisms are needed to distribute game instances among servers to avoid load imbalances that affect performance negatively. In this work, we tackle the problem of game distribution and scalability by means of a hybrid Client-Server/P2P architecture that can scale dynamically according to the demand. To manage peak loads that occur during the game, we distribute game computation across the system according to the behavior of MMORPGs. We distinguish between the computation associated with the Main Game, that affects all players, and the computation of Auxiliary Games that affects only a few players and acts in isolation from the execution of the Main Game. Taking this distinction into account, we propose a mechanism that is focused in the distribution of Auxiliary Games, as an entity, across the pool of servers and peers of the underlying hybrid architecture. We evaluate the performance of the balancing mechanism taking the criteria of latency and reliability into account, and we compare the effectiveness of the mechanism with a classic approach that applies load balancing to individually players in a Client-Server system. We show that the balancing mechanism based on the latency criteria provides lower latency Appl (2016Appl ( ) 75:2005Appl ( -2029 than the classical proposal, while in relation to reliability, we obtain a failure probability of under 0.9 % in the worst case, which is amply compensated by the scalability provided by the use of the P2P area.

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“…Bart De Vleeshauwer et al provided the dynamic microcell assignment [7], [8]. They divide the virtual world to the small cells called the microcell.…”

Section: Literature Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Meta-Heuristic Approach for Dynamic Data Allocation on a Multiple Web Server System

Kohana

Okamoto

Ikegami

2013

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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Masaki KOHANA †a) , Shusuke OKAMOTO †b) , Members, and Atsuko IKEGAMI †c) , Nonmember SUMMARYThis paper describes a near-optimal allocation method for web-based multi-player online role-playing games (MORPGs), which must be able to cope with a large number of users and high frequency of user requests. Our previous work introduced a dynamic data reallocation method. It uses multiple web servers and divides the entire game world into small blocks. Each ownership of block is allocated to a web server. Additionally, the ownership is reallocated to the other web server according to the user's requests. Furthermore, this block allocation was formulated as a combinational optimization problem. And a simulation based experiment with an exact algorithm showed that our system could achieve 31% better than an ad-hoc approach. However, the exact algorithm takes too much time to solve a problem when the problem size is large. This paper proposes a meta-heuristic approach based on a tabu search to solve a problem quickly. A simulation result shows that our tabu search algorithm can generate solutions, whose average correctness is only 1% different from that of the exact algorithm. In addition, the average calculation time for 50 users on a system with five web servers is about 25.67 msec while the exact algorithm takes about 162 msec. An evaluation for a web-based MORPG system with our tabu search shows that it could achieve 420 users capacity while 320 for our previous system. key words: web-based application, dynamic data allocation, tabu search algorithm

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Dynamic microcell assignment for massively multiplayer online gaming

Cited by 58 publications

References 3 publications

On the effectiveness of an optimization method for the traffic of TCP-based multiplayer online games

On the effectiveness of an optimization method for the traffic of TCP-based multiplayer online games

Distributing game instances in a hybrid client-server/P2P system to support MMORPG playability

A Meta-Heuristic Approach for Dynamic Data Allocation on a Multiple Web Server System

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