Dynamic Resource Provisioning with Hotspot Anticipation for MMOG Clouds

Recently, there are various kinds of games that have been served via the internet. An example of such games is MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) that has become the most popular game service in the world. For saving operating cost and simplifying management of servers, gaming service providers are combining their online services with cloud computing technology. In MMOG virtual environments, avatars are often acting as a group to help one another to achieve certain goals or defeat bosses, which may become a hotspot in a virtual world. Frequent interactions between avatars in hotspots may generate lots of workload and may cause decrease of quality of service (QoS). The latency of gaming service will increase when there are too many hotspots in a single server, which may harm the quality of experience (QoE) enormously. To address this problem, in general, games operators over-allocate resources to game zones, which may cause the waste of gaming resources. In this paper, we propose a dynamic resource provisioning with hotspot anticipation scheme, called NN-Player+DRP-HA that employs a vector based model to monitor the movement of avatars in a virtual world. Furthermore, we use a finite state machine to

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