Scaling online games with adaptive interest management in the cloud

Traditional client-server online games do not scale well in terms of the number of players they can support. Most of this is due to the quadratic growth of bandwidth requirements as the number of players increases, and the limitations on processing power of any single machine. Considering the excitement a first person shooter (FPS) game can provide by bringing an epic scale online battle to real life, we present a scalable cloud-based architecture able to host hundreds of players in an online FPS game. We host the game in a cloud, rather than on a single machine, and reduce aggregate bandwidth requirements of the game by using a scalable publish-subscribe subsystem. Each player expresses its preferences about other players using an interest set, and receives updates accordingly. Our evaluations, both in a testbed and cloud environment, show our architecture can scale to hundreds of players, an order of magnitude more players than state-of-the-art FPS game servers can currently support.