On Server Provisioning for Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming has gained significant popularity recently due to many important benefits such as removal of device constraints, instant-on and cross-platform, etc. The properties of intensive resource demands and dynamic workloads make cloud gaming appropriate to be supported by an elastic cloud platform. Facing a large user population, a fundamental problem is how to provide satisfactory cloud gaming service at modest cost. We observe that software maintenance cost could be substantial compared to server running cost in cloud gaming. In this paper, we address the server provisioning problem for cloud gaming to optimize both server running cost and software maintenance cost. We find that the distribution of game softwares among servers triggers a trade-off between the software maintenance cost and server running cost. We formulate the problem with a stochastic model and employ queueing theories to conduct solid theoretical analysis. We then propose several classes of algorithms to approximate the optimal solution. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by extensive experiments using real-world parameters. The results show that the proposed algorithms are computationally efficient, nearly cost-optimal and highly robust to dynamic changes.