Comparison of static and dynamic resource allocations for massively multiplayer online games on unreliable resources

Abstract

We investigate the use of a new Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) ecosystem consisting of end-users, game providers, game operators, and Cloud resource providers, for autonomous, selfadaptive hosting and operation of MMOGs on unreliable resources. For this purpose, we developed an MMOG simulator compliant with our MMOG ecosystem in which we inject traces collected from a real-world MMOG and resource characteristics from 16 Cloud providers. Using our simulator, we study the impact on the involved actors by considering different resource availability levels, and highlight the advantages of dynamic resource allocation over the static overprovisioning with respect to two types of metrics: QoS offered to the clients and financial profit of game providers and operators.