On-Demand Resource Allocation Middleware for Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Traditionally, commercial MMOGs are deployed on large privately owned server clusters with hundreds of computing devices linked through high bandwidth connections. In this scenario, the dynamic and unpredictable workload variability of MMOGs frequently leads to resources being under/over used with negative impact on playability and/or cost-effectiveness. In our research work, we see cloud computing as a fundamental approach to mitigate the problem of inefficient resource provisioning, due to its inherent elasticity properties. Thus, we propose a cloud-aware middleware for MMOGs, in which virtual machines obtained from cloud providers are added and removed from the system according to load changes observed at runtime. In this paper, we report on our first steps towards such an infrastructure.