Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Chapter 19. MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAME HOSTING ON CLOUD RESOURCES

VLAD NAE, RADU PRODAN, and ALEXANDRU IOSUP

INTRODUCTION

Massively Multiplayer On-Line Games (MMOGs) have emerged in the past decade as a new type of large-scale distributed application characterized by a huge real-time virtual world entertaining millions of players spread across the globe. Today's MMOGs operate as client-server architectures, in which the game server simulates a world via computing and database operations, receives and processes commands from the clients, and interoperates with a billing and accounting system [1, 2]. Based on the actions submitted by the players, the game servers compute the global state of the game world represented by the position and interactions of the entities, and they send appropriate realtime responses to the players containing the new relevant state information. Depending on the game, typical response times to ensure fluent play must be between 100 msec in on-line First Person Shooter (FPS) action games and 1-2sec for Role-Playing Games (RPG). A good game experience is critical in keeping the players engaged, and it has an immediate consequence on the income of the MMOG operators. Failing to deliver timely simulation updates leads to a degraded game experience and triggers player departure.

To support thousands of concurrent players and many more other game entities, MMOG operators install and operate a large static infrastructure consisting of hundreds to thousands of ...