Server Allocation for Multiplayer Cloud Gaming

Abstract

Advances in cloud computing and GPU virtualization are allowing the game industry to move into a cloud gaming era. While shifting standalone video games to the cloud gaming mode is straightforward, adapting multiplayer online games to the cloud gaming paradigm faces unique challenges. In this paper, we consider multiplayer cloud gaming (MCG), which is the natural integration of multiplayer online gaming and cloud gaming paradigms. We formulate an MCG server allocation problem with the objective of minimizing the total server rental and bandwidth cost charged by the cloud to support an MCG session. We propose several efficient heuristics to address the MCG server allocation problem which is hard to solve optimally. We conduct extensive experiments using real Internet latency and cloud pricing data to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms as well as several alternatives. Experimental results show that our best algorithm can achieve near-optimal cost under real-time latency constraints.